A new version of the world's most popular free software license was released Friday – a banner event for the software industry even though many developers are no longer interested in using it to license their code.
At an event held at the headquarters of the Free Software Foundation in Boston, Richard Stallman read a statement announcing the arrival of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. But while the GPL sorely needed a re-write to bring the license – under which two thirds of the world's free software is governed – up to date with the current technological ecosystem, it's the very nature of the GPL's "freedom first" philosophy that has some developers seeking other licensing options.
The terms of other popular open-source software licenses like Apache and BSD allow developers more freedom to distribute their software how they see fit, such as the ability to make custom changes to a piece of software – thus giving one a competitive edge – and redistribute it without re-publishing the code for all to use. Such practices are not allowed under the GPL, which requires developers to release any and all changes under the same license as the original work if the software is redistributed in some way.
Greg Stein, engineering manager at Google and current chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, maintains that developers want more permissive licenses than the GPL – a position he often speaks out in support of.
"They don't want conditions imposed upon them," he told Wired News in an e-mail. "They want to have as many choices as possible. Thus, if two software packages are otherwise equal, a developer will choose the package with the more permissive license to incorporate into their own work."
Stein says that most users don't care which open-source license their software uses.
"Developers care, however, so there is a natural pressure towards permissive," he says. "I am not seeing any pressures towards less permissive that might counter. So the natural trend will be towards a software ecosystem that is primarily permissively-licensed."
Advocates of the GPL sometimes compare the practice of adding value to an existing product and releasing it commercially without sharing one's source code to income tax evasion. So you want to take what's on offer and give nothing back? Shame, shame...
The validity of the analogy notwithstanding, the debate is a heated one. Since the more permissive licenses are theoretically more economically feasible for people trying to make money off of open-source software, developers looking for more commercial distribution options will trend towards non-GPL licenses.
If the scales start to tip, it will be difficult for GNU to maintain its leadership position in the open-source community. If the community moves in one direction – towards more permissive – and you're moving the opposite direction, who do you think is going to win?
(Updated on 6/30 at 10AM to clarify some incorrect wording – thanks, Steve.)
