Moglen foresees many ways of shielding downstream users, including companies disclaiming their own licenses or creating patent
pools like the Open Invention Network formed in November by IBM, Red Hat, and others. Like many of the conditions in the draft
GPL 3, the shielding issue should be read as "an invitation to a discussion," Moglen said, implying the language of the license
may well change.
Arnö welcomed the move. "The GPL 3 attempts at minimizing the problems from the Sick Man of Software, i.e. the patent system,
without fighting the SWPATs [software patents] in a windmill fashion," he wrote. "For the sake of the downstream users (that's
you and me), I hope there is enough legal clarity." This is one area that the FSF's Discussion Committee B, which Arnö co-chairs,
will focus on over the coming months, he added. The committee includes representatives from HP, IBM, and Intel along with
midsize companies such as MySQL, Red Hat, and Trolltech.
While the FSF has long held that software patents presented a major problem, a newer area of controversy the organization
is taking up in the GPL 3 draft is DRM. "There's no end to the harm" DRM can cause, according to Moglen, with consumer electronics
and IT companies likely to find themselves in the middle of the ongoing furious debate between content producers and end-users,
he said.
"Not all players will like the FSF position," Arnö wrote. "But, hey, FSF is the 'benevolent dictator' whose wisdom developers
and users of GPL software have to rely on!"
One area that surprised some people was the FSF's move to make the GPL 3 draft compatible with the Apache Software License
and Eclipse Public License. Previously, the organization had stressed the incompatibility between GPL and the two open-source
software licenses. Having the compatibility in place going forward may result in more people using the GPL in combined works
as well as making them feel more comfortable about adopting the FSF license, according to Brown.
"At MySQL, we've gone through a lot of trouble to create what we call the "FOSS Exception", which actually is an extension
(or, "permission" in GPL 3 parlance) of the license," Arnö wrote. "That took a lot of effort and lawyer fees."
Christine Martino, vice president of open source and Linux at HP, also foresaw a positive impact in more easily being able
to combine source code from different projects. However, she cautioned that such compatibility may add a degree of complexity
to the management of license information. "If this feature of the license is adopted, it would become necessary to track a
new class of special license information; whereas in the past, GPL-licensed projects had much simpler licensing information
(just GPL)," Martino wrote in an e-mail request for comment.
The FSF has worked hard on trying to further internationalize the GPL, according to Moglen, with the ultimate aim to create
a "global GPL," he said. "We've cut free from the moorings of the U.S. law as much as we could," he added. "We've got a lot
to do."
Where the FSF has not yet ventured is in creating legally binding translations of the GPL, according to Arnö.
While previous versions of the GPL have been translated into a plethora of languages, none of the translations have the official
approval of the FSF. The only authentic version of the license is in English, with the FSF stating that checking translations
of the license would be difficult and expensive and should any errors slip through the translation process, the entire free
software community could be harmed. The unofficial translations are for native speakers to better understand the license,
not to be used in any legal process.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
