A link to Bob Sutor of IBM, sharing his thoughts on GPL3. Note Jim Delong's comments, anticipating some trouble over DRM, web services, patents and interoperability, and dynamic linking. Who has the better crystal ball? We'll see. Supposing that those issues are smoothed out, however... here are some meta-issues.

Most people do not think about process concerns so long as a more-or-less tolerable outcome is reached. Perhaps a good way to save energy as a general strategy. But when the process is novel and bugs not yet worked out, a little more awareness could save some trouble down the road.

-The practice of using the license propagated via FSF's libraries as an instrument of retaliation or discipline against Tivo, Novell, Google, and others who have violated the spirit of the license but not its letter ... ought to raise some red flags. A license that cannot be used as a basis for business planning to avoid conflict and liability is not fulfilling its basic business function, whatever its other merits. All licenses fail in this function in some respect... no one can foresee everything. But it is one thing to fail inadvertantly, it is another thing entirely for a license to be designed with the purpose of retroactively foiling the plans of those who relied on it. Here are the options:

-FSF licenses its key libraries under GPL3; Novell, Linux and others cannot come up with alternatives as a practical business matter, and cannot link to the FSF libraries without opting for GPL3. Unpalatable, for what it means is that when one elects to use any version of GPL, one is for practical purposes stuck with later versions as well... and whatever instruments of disapproval are inserted there in.

-FSF licenses its key libraries under GPL3; Novell, Linux and others come up with alternatives, and GPL3 and GPL2 continue an increasingly uneasy coexistence, heading for court somewhere down the road to determine.

-FSF licenses its key libraries under GPL3... Novel, Linux and others can link without opting for GPL3... in which case GPL3 is rather toothless, but at least seems to reflect that the process *does* work in the sense of not turning to devour its own children.

GPL3 hopes to avoid the last scenarios--GPL2 hanging on as the license of preference for commercial open source ventures--because of the appeal of GPL3 to developers. Much of that appeal, though, is hoped to stem from GPL3's patent defenses. What seems to have been forgotten is that the software patent problems--while thorny--are largely theoretical. That is, while there certainly would be hell to pay if software patent holders did indeed all start to sue each other, that simply hasn't happened. And pretty much all the players in the industry seem to recognize that this would do more harm than good. GPL3 is prematurely fighting the next war.

More later.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 10:31 AM | Software

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