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100 people gathered in Napa, CA, in March for the 2d Annual Open Source Think Tank "to provide a venue for thought leaders from key segments of the open source industry to collaboratively discuss, brainstorm and develop solutions to key issues in the growth and maturation of commercial open source."
Their thoughts on GPLv3:
GPLv3 (Draft 2) was a subject of much concern at the Think Tank. [Note: the Think Tank was held before GPLv3 Draft 3 was released, so many of the concerns expressed may be alleviated, or not, by the new draft.] Fears included the potential for a fork in Linux, with Linus Torvalds and the kernel group remaining in the GPLv2 camp, while the compiler group and others move to GPLv3. The anti-DRM provision was universally disliked, as it was viewed as social policy masquerading as a software license. Overall, participants generally felt that businesses would manage to reduce their exposure to GPLv3, mainly through policies restricting the procurement or use of GPLv3 software. This could have serious repercussions on the future of open source if many open source projects re-license their software under GPLv3, forcing customers to make hard decisions on whether or not they should continue using GPL software, including Linux. Since "the 100 attendees represented many
sectors of the open source ecosystem including senior executives from large and small software vendors (both open source and proprietary), CIOs, venture capitalists, analysts and other industry experts," it would appear that the fissure in the FOSS movement between the Free Software Foundation and reality-based community is becoming a chasm.
posted by James DeLong @ 7:45 AM | Software
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