From the Editors: Happy birthday, GPL v3
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By SD Times News Team
July 15, 2008 —
The GNU General Public License version 3 is one year old and already walking, albeit a little wobbly compared with its very successful sibling, the 17-year-old GPL v2.
V3 marked its first birthday on June 29. Already more than 3,000 free and open-source projects based on the new license have been commenced, according to a list posted on Black Duck Software’s Web site. In fact, if you refresh that page, you may see a few more pop up.
However, despite the brisk pace, v2 remains the favorite, with about 69% of projects remaining based on the earlier version authored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The variations of v3 barely top a 2% share of the top 20 licenses. Still, v3 is off to a great start. We’re impressed, to be honest, with how well v3 has done, despite warnings from naysayers during development.
The FSF pushed v3 as a reaction to moves by software companies to thwart free use of software—not free as in unpaid for, but free as in how consumers can use what they have paid for. As some mistakenly believe, v3 does not cancel digital restrictions management (DRM) provisions that some software companies have imposed, but it does make them less punitive. Under v3, if someone develops tools to thwart DRM features, they can’t be thrown in jail.
V3 also aims to curb discriminatory patent infringement claims. When Microsoft partnered with Novell in 2006, Microsoft said it wouldn’t sue Novell users for alleged violations of Microsoft patents. But that indemnification doesn’t apply to other Linux users. V3 prevents a repeat of that kind of move.
The new license also closes a big loophole with its AGPL license. The “A” stands for Affero and refers to a provision that requires license holders who use the software-as-a-service model also to share their source code with users.
Overall, v3 clears up some of the thorny legalese in v2 that needlessly complicated life for software users.
Software companies can’t be blamed for taking a wait-and-see attitude. Some are staying with v2 because it still constitutes the bulk of the market. While supportive of the FSF’s free software campaign, we take exception to their complaint that companies sticking with v2 want to “imprison their users.”
While migration to v3 may be limited so far, its 3,000-plus v3 projects—including popular and well-known projects such as Funambol, Samba, SugarCRM and Ubuntu—amount to strong early traction for v3. Happy birthday!
Symbian may be the next Eclipse
The announcement that Nokia was buying Symbian—and releasing its namesake mobile-phone operating system under an open-source license—was newsworthy. It became even bigger news when Nokia said that the Symbian Foundation, which will bring a large number of mobile players, including competitors Samsung and Motorola, would manage the evolution of the Symbian OS platform.
The comparisons to the Eclipse Foundation were obvious. IBM knew it would gain many benefits by turning its Eclipse IDE over to an industry consortium: lowering costs, improving interoperability, gaining access to intellectual property and ensuring that Eclipse became a de facto standard. The success of the Eclipse Foundation demonstrates that this type of guided open-source development can be important.
Not all open-source projects gain that much traction. Sun released the NetBeans tools platform and Solaris operating system as open source, but the company keeps tight reins on both of them. Neither has taken the world by storm the way the more-open Apache, Eclipse and Linux projects have. If Nokia allows real collaboration, Symbian OS might take off.
It’s unclear how much of Nokia’s Symbian plans are a reaction to Google’s forthcoming Android mobile platform. In some ways, Symbian OS and Android—which is also governed by a consortium, the Open Handset Alliance—are competitive. In other ways, they’re complementary. If they play nicely, the opportunities for all parties are very significant.
Related Search Term(s): GNU, open source, Eclipse, Nokia, Symbian
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