The new draft of the most popular free and open source license would allow projects to borrow from non-GPL sources.
The Free Software Foundation is building a plug-in system for optional patent and trademark terms into the new version of its much-used, much-debated license.
A new discussion draft of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL) could be a step toward enabling GPL-licensed software projects to use code developed under different open source licenses.
“I’m confident that the new GPLv3 will be compatible with the Apache license. That’s a major goal of FSF. I see nothing in this latest draft that would prevent it,” wrote open source attorney and author Lawrence Rosen in an email interview. Rosen previously served as general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), and is a member of an FSF-invited license discussion committee.
The new license draft would allow developers to plug in some license terms from other licenses, such as legal language that terminates the license if the user files a patent infringement lawsuit, restrictions on a redistributor’s right to use trademarks, or requirements that a company that lets users run the software online also offer them the source code.
The Free Software Foundation has also drafted a version of its GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) that is the GPL draft plus additional permissions.
Besides Apache’s, the list of which licenses could allow for sharing of code to GPL-licenced projects is yet to be determined. “In our committee, we asked repeatedly for an analysis by FSF of which licenses are compatible and which are not. Perhaps that document has been written but I haven’t seen one yet,” he added. Several background documents are mentioned on the FSF’s discussion site but not yet available.
Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, said in an audio announcement accompanying the new draft that it also offers improved “internationalization,” with the intent of being usable under the copyright law of all nations compliant with the Berne Convention.
The new draft also contains a substantial re-work of the section on Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and what Moglen calls “paracopyright” laws like the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. According to notes in the draft, the DRM-related terms are both narrower, in that they would specifically protect the user’s right to run the GPL-covered code, not to decrypt DRM-restricted content, but more general in that they would prohibit more kinds of DRM-related restrictions on running modified versions of the code.
DRM-related language in earlier drafts provoked much controversy, with Linux creator Linus Torvalds writing in a post to the linux-kernel mailing list, “I think it’s insane to require people to make their private signing keys available, for example. I wouldn’t do it.” Linux is the best-known project under the GPL, and with thousands of contributors and a GPL version 2-only licensing policy, is unlikely to move to the new license. Other essential projects, however, such as the GNU C Library and the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), have copyrights held by the Free Software Foundation.
The new GPL, though, does not allow for software authors to collect attorney’s fees from infringers, or to require that redistributors of the software obtain users’ agreement to a contract, as with a “shrink-wrap” or “click-wrap” license. Both of these provisions make it incompatible with Rosen’s Academic Free License and Open Software License. “I intend to continue to argue against FSF’s position on this point,” Rosen wrote. A “last call” draft of the new GPL is scheduled for “approximately October 2006.”
