The Controversy Over GPL 3

By Charles Babcock, Courtesy of InformationWeek
Mar 17 2007 (0:02 AM)

There's a rift developing between camps within the free software movement over the next version of the most popular open source license, known as the General Public License, or GPL. And while that infighting might appear to be little more than a family squabble, its ramifications could be significant for how companies use open source software in the future.

A new version of the GPL, the third overall and the first revision since 1991, was supposed to be released this month. But controversy over several new provisions--and the authors' ambitions to thwart Microsoft's Linux pact with Novell--have delayed it until later this year.

Unless there's a radical reworking of GPL version 3 (GPLv3, in the programmer lexicon), a significant portion of the open source community will reject it, chief among them Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. "I will not sign on to GPLv3 if it limits how the code is used," Torvalds says in a lengthy E-mail exchange with InformationWeek.

If popular GPL projects diverge over time into incompatible products--those developed under GPLv3 and those under GPLv2--it will multiply the licensing and compatibility complications that already dog corporate open source adoption.

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