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Prominent FOSS community citizen, Matt Asay (who I personally enjoy reading), comments on the slow adoption of GPLv3. Asay states that an estimated: ...119 projects have converted (to GPL/LGPLv3), which represents less than 1 percent of projects using the General Public License, or GPL. Nothing to write home about, in other words. This, by itself, isn't worth knocking GPLv3 for, since due diligence really starts after the license is released. FOSS projects can require as much intellectual property compliance effort as proprietary development.
A common misconception is that FOSS development incurs less need for intellectual property clearance. Thats not the case since FOSS licenses reside on copyright law. FOSS development can draw greater transaction costs when inputs are too decentralized. Efforts to standardize FOSS licensing seek to ameliorate these transaction costs. To the FOSS community, this may seem like a kind of moral streamlining, to consumers and the rest of the technology sector, it appears as an effort to confine the diversity and flexibility of licensing arrangements that have enabled business strategies for organizations and furthered innovation in the industry.
Asay continues- I actually think the primary problem is that GPLv3 didn't go far enough, in many ways. It's an updated version of GPLv2, which is good, but it doesn't resolve some of the industry's most pressing issues, like the ASP loophole.
Instead, it tackles DRM (digital rights management), TiVo and other such issues that are salient to the Free Software Foundation but not so much to most of us. Asay is right about the ASP loophole. See Tony Healy's comments. But what Asay misses is that the anti-DRM and anti-Tivoization provisions of GPLv3, that he contends diverted attention away from more important concerns, created the most controversy between the Free Software Foundation and others in the technology sector during GPLv3 development. Arguably, these provisions do more to scare potential adoptors away than any other factor. If they were not that important to the general FOSS community, one must wonder why they were even engraved into the final GPLv3.
posted by Noel Le @ 6:31 AM | Free Culture Movement
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