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New GPL License Is Coming; Linus Torvalds Wishes It Weren't

I was surprised in an e-mail exchange with Linus Torvalds at the depth of his criticism of the next version of the General Public License. I thought his differences with the Free Software Foundation would just fade away. Now I believe that it's not a simple issue to resolve.

InformationWeek is querying knowledgeable parties on the nature of the upcoming 3.0 revision of the GPL, the software license that has played such an important role in changing our computing landscape.

We are all indebted to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation for its willingness to stand the defensive rights of copyright on their head. The GPL creates a more open, shared software environment. To not recognize the beneficence of this stroke is to have been asleep for the past decade, or longer.

Having said that, I am struck by the contrast between the lofty ambitions that Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are now placing behind GPL 3.0 versus Torvalds' common sense.

The GPLv2 license adopted 16 years ago did something straightforward. It granted people the right to use the software for free in exchange for meeting one or two simple requirements: 1) Don't sue someone who's using the GPL software you're redistributing for violating one of your patents. 2) Do include any modifications you've made to the software as you redistribute it.

"I absolutely love the GPLv2 because it embodies that 'develop in the open' model," wrote Torvalds. The emphasis is his; I can honestly say he rarely uses the word "love" in connection with anything from the Free Software Foundation.

He notes GPLv3 has been criticized as a Free Software Foundation political platform. He agrees and quarrels with FSF's conception of "proprietary software as being something evil and immoral. Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not evil or immoral. It just doesn't matter."

Developing code with freely assembled teams under the GPL is a better way of writing software, he says. There are few who have put their money where their mouth is more fully on that point. He can still excoriate GPLv3 for its ban on digital rights management and other prohibitions that appear to be headed into the text. Too much, he says. But his most telling points are pro-GPLv2.

There's no point in protesting GPLv3 as a political platform. In its time, the GPLv2 was a political platform as well, he reminds us. But in its minimalist restrictions and its generous rights, "the GPLv2 is something that you can agree to despite different politics and that's something I think the Linux community has been very good at." Indeed, he quietly makes the point that he's not interested in other people's politics; he wants to concentrate on the quality of the code, and that's a key attribute of open source development projects. With GPLv3, however, everyone will have a political point of view thrust upon them, he says. That's as close as he comes to hyperbole.

"The reason I really like the GPLv2 is exactly that it allows everybody to be selfish and not have to really believe in any other politics. We can all be selfish and do things that make sense for ourselves."

He likes the giveback requirement that Stallman artfully included as a stroke of freedom. In the old days, other people stole your code and modified it for their own purposes. Nowadays, people are allowed to steal your code and modify it; they just have to share those modifications with you. And in the long run, that's your best guarantee of rights and software empowerment.

"Yes, you can be a freeloader, [use the code] and not do anything at all… you also won't get your specific needs looked at by the people who truly helped in development," he notes.

The GPLv2, he says, encourages people to work together with minimal rules involved. "That's a kind of beauty, to me. People are encouraged to chip in and help, not because of some political agenda, or because they try to be 'good people' but simply because it helps themselves more than not…"

And that, it seems to me, is very close to the notion of freedom that undergirds much of the rest of our society. Torvalds has expressed the essence of where freedom lies in developing and using software. It's tinged with a developer's self-interest, but isn't that the point of view that's given us our rich set of software options today?

Maybe GPLv3 will expand those choices in unexpected ways, just as the GPLv2 did.

Or maybe we should pause in our rush toward the bans, the prohibitions, and the rules being discussed for GPLv3 and consider the wisdom inherent in GPLv2's minimalist approach.

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