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GPLv2 Ambiguities Linger On

Scarcely a week goes by without some criticism or analysis of open source licensing, and this time around it's whether or not the GPLv2's "legally ambiguous".

The whole story comes by way of The Register, gleaned from a larger discussion about licensing hosted by Black Duck Software. The folks in question are Mark Radcliffe and Karen Coenhaver, the former serving as counsel for the Open Source Initiative (the group that most people turn to for word on which open source licenses are valid) and the latter being counsel for the Linux Foundation. They expressed concern that the way the GPLv2 was worded isn't up to speed:

The challenge, according to the two lawyers, is that US copyright framework is not well suited to computer software. A term like "derivative work" may be reasonably easy to understand in the context of a book or a movie, but there are several levels more difficult in terms of software. GPLv2 tosses out this legal terminology in free fashion.

Radcliffe's (and Copenhaver's) criticism is that the GPLv2 mixes and matches the meanings of too many different things -- the meaning of a "derivative work", for instance -- and that the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are better worded to suit the ambiguities of these situations.

What I found most intriguing was this passage from the article:

"I think the critical thing to recognize in the differentiation between GPLv2, GPLv3, and AGPLv3 is that there was a very strong effort to purposefully distance ourselves from copyright laws," said Radcliffe. Copyright law is "not stable," he says, and it changes over time. Equally important is that copyright law varies from country to country.

I.e., open source (and free) software would not be where they are now without the protections afforded by copyright, but the situation might be different in the future.

I don't think this means they believe copyright is on the way out. It's too deeply entrenched and too genuinely useful to too many people (little guys and big guys alike), and when it changes it typically changes to favor the copyright owners. I do believe parallel developments (like Creative Commons) will become both more respected and useful, but not in a way that makes copyright irrelevant.

From everything I've seen, though, there's little to suggest the GPLv2 isn't a defensible choice in the real world, where everything from the Linux kernel on down uses it. What is happening, though, is growing interest in the galaxy of licensing options apart from the GPLv2 -- both for the reasons cited above, and the fact that each license comes with its own world of software, developers and community contribution attached to it.

When you pick a license for a project, that speaks a great deal about what kind of work you want done with it -- and what you want other people to do with it, and how. The GPLv2 still carries a great deal of weight in that respect and probably will for a long time to come.

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