Eben Moglen: GPLv3 set for success

Eben Moglen, the law professor and open-source legal expert who has helped lead the revision of the General Public License, is predicting broad success for the upcoming new version.

"I predict that within the first year of adoption of GPLv3 there will be a net uptake by parties currently not using GPL that will be great in magnitude," Moglen told an audience in San Francisco on Tuesday at the Open Source Business Conference. That uptake will include "dozens of commercially important projects capable of choosing any licence they want, where they today use licences that don't call for hard copyleft".

Copyleft, a term coined by Free Software Foundation (FSF) founder Richard Stallman, refers to a key requirement of the GPL that an individual or organisation that changes and distributes software must make those changes public. Some more "permissive" open-source licences such as the Apache License permit changes to be kept secret and open-source software to be tightly incorporated into proprietary software.

Moglen is overseeing a contentious process of revamping the GPL, the most widely used licence in the free and open-source software realm. Moglen, a Columbia law school professor and former IBM programmer, is stepping down as counsel to the FSF, but he remains active in another group called the Software Freedom Law Center.

Early drafts of GPLv3 triggered significant objections from several parties, including Linus Torvalds, leader of the GPL-covered Linux kernel. But the third and most recent draft of GPLv3 met with fewer gripes, and Moglen was bullish about its prospects.

"We're four weeks from finished now, and we have consensus on large, important, major changes," Moglen said. "Everybody is equally browned off, and that is how it should be, but we're all finishing together."

Drafting the new GPL, like writing open-source software, is a collective exercise in which numerous parties depend on one another, he said. "Everybody is so heavily embarked in everybody else's boats, and the consequences of failure are so far-reaching, people have no choice but to share their ideas and seek compromise and co-existence," Moglen said.

The GPL has the power to enable open-source software to dethrone Microsoft from its position of dominance, Moglen said. "The time is rapidly approaching when the GPL is capable of levelling the monopolist to the ground," he said.

Microsoft, with its packaged, proprietary software, has wiped out profit margins for hardware and services, he said. "The tax imposed by software was so high," he said. "Nobody has ever successfully calculated the harm done by Microsoft to the world. The number is too vast."

One provision Stallman considered but rejected for GPLv3 was some mechanism to deal with modifications to GPL software available as a network service. Under GPLv2, an entity that modifies the software but doesn't distribute it need not publish the changes, and that will continue under GPLv3, even if that software is available over the internet through mechanisms today called application service providers or software as a service.

"The rights of a person who receives a service are different from the rights of a person who receives software as a program object," Moglen said.

Google in particular widely uses open-source software internally for services available publicly. It makes some open-source software changes publicly available, such as its modifications to the MySQL database. The free and open-source movement will apply other pressures to make sure such companies don't abuse the privilege, Moglen said.

"If you want to protect your business model, you must be model citizens of the environment. If you shrink, political pressure will grow to constrain your rights to secure the rights of everyone else," Moglen said. "Upon the behaviour of Google much depends."

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