Guidelines for GPLv3 Process Released

Justin Baugh writes "The Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center have released a document detailing the guidelines and the process that will be used for revising the GNU GPL, and have launched a new website related to the V3 process. It was announced in a press release this morning that the FSF will be releasing the first discussion draft of the new license for comments at the International Public Conference for GPLv3 at MIT on January 16 and 17, 2006."

Comments

Still a bit wary of one element of the GPL

[GauteL]

.. namely the one in which you grant permission for your software to be distributed according to any future version of the GPL. I do know you are not required to include this clause, but both decisions can have consequences.

Without it, it can be hard for the licensing to adapt to new requirements if not all the copyright owners can be found.

With it, you are at the mercy of the Free Software Foundation, when it comes to new versions of the GPL. I trust the FSF completely not to have any hidden motives, but it still might be that a future version of the GPL does not suit you.

A clause of "NAME OF FOUNDER OF PROJECT is free to upgrade this license to any future version of the GPL at his/her discretion" might be a better idea. This way, you CAN switch to new versions of the GPL even though you have thousands of contributors each with individual copyright on bits of the code, but you can also refuse to license the software under a future version of the GPL if it is not in your interest.

Re:Still a bit wary of one element of the GPL

[Kjella]

A clause of "NAME OF FOUNDER OF PROJECT is free to upgrade this license to any future version of the GPL at his/her discretion" might be a better idea. This way, you CAN switch to new versions of the GPL even though you have thousands of contributors each with individual copyright on bits of the code, but you can also refuse to license the software under a future version of the GPL if it is not in your interest.

Not to get overly philsophical, but did my patch join your program, or did your program join my patch? Copyright considers it a derivative work of both, and the concept of a "founder" doesn't exist in the legal sense. Every time you took a piece of code from another project, you would have to ask them to relicense it to acknowledge you as the founder. In many cases it makes no sense at all, because an application and a library wouldn't have any reason to recognize each other as founders. You would have to end up with an LGPLish upgrade clause in the GPL, which would be a total mess. Also, one of the fundamental freedoms of the GPL is to fork the code, and the initial founder may not at all represent the current developers of the code. If you want that kind of control, make it one of the requirements for contributing. Basicly, instead of assigning copyright, just assign a limited right to release under future GPL versions (which you could also do today with GPLv2, but I don't know of anyone that does). I think that the same people who distrust FSF the will also distrust your project, and retain all relicensing rights for their own judgement so I don't think it would work if you tried.

Re:Who would of thought

[LiquidCoooled]

The GPL is not giving your code away for free.

The GPL is a license to ensure that your code and other code built using it remains open and usable by others.

Just giving the code away for free would allow an evil company to take somebodies hard work and lock it up in an exe shell with a squad of lawyers protecting the source.

Public Domain is noble but not wise.

Re:Stupid question...

[meringuoid]

A video game is a prime example. It takes a long time to write a good game but you can only sell it for $35-$50. You could make the game engine open source and still be blessed by RMS. RMS for some reason things that it is fine for the "content" of a video game not be open source. I have no idea why he feels that way.

RMS is a hacker. RMS thinks the innovative 3D engine in Quake is really cool, and wants to be able to play around with it to see what else he can make it do. He wants to create new things based on Quake: I recall, once the source was released, there was a mod that made Quake into a flight sim, another that gave you a warped fish-eye view, there was ttyQuake which was just deeply wrong, there were ports of Quake to every machine that would sit still long enough...

But RMS doesn't give a damn about the levels iD happened to provide along with Quake - why should he? To a hacker, they're irrelevant. Suppose Microsoft were to say 'right, you can have the code to the Windows kernel, NTFS, SMB, the Word and Excel file formats, all under GPL. But the fonts, sound effects and wallpapers, those we're keeping.' Well, who cares? We can create our own fonts and wallpapers, dammit...