GPL v3 blows out first candle

By Robert Mullins

June 27, 2008 —

As it marks its first anniversary, the GNU General Public License v3 has drawn the interest of more than 3,000 open-source software projects, a number that could double by its second birthday, according to one company that’s keeping score. Although that’s tiny compared to the number of GPL v2 licenses, a spokesperson for the leading advocate of GPL v3 said that its adoption rate is a sign of success.

The Free Software Foundation released GPL v3, the latest scheme for governing the use of open-source software, on June 29, 2007, after 18 months of deliberation. It was intended to simplify Byzantine language in GPL v2 and more assertively advance the cause of free—as in able to be freely used—software. But while backers are impressed that GPL v3 projects are growing at the rate of about 20% a month, most GPL v2 licensees are unlikely to quickly migrate to GPL v3.

“We have nothing against GPL v3, but we still see most of the market using GPL v2,” said Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing for Talend, a provider of data integration software. “We feel no need to be the first ones to make a move.”

The first moves have already been made. SugarCRM, a maker of free and open-source customer relationship management software, was one of the first adopters, switching to GPL v3 from its own Sugar Public License as soon as GPL v3 took effect. The Linux distribution Ubuntu is also an early adopter, as is the Funambol development platform, which adopts a dual-licensing model of both open-source and commercial versions of its software.

Black Duck Software, whose software helps customers manage their open-source software, has been tracking GPL v3 adoption over the last year and sees some interesting trends. A list on its Web site identified 3,069 GPL v3 projects as of today. In the last six months, the number of projects using GPL v3 has grown by roughly one-fifth of the previous month’s figure. That growth may slow to 10% a month as pent-up demand for v3 is satisfied, said Doug Levin, Black Duck’s CEO, but it’s still “an impressive number.” Levin predicts that 6,000 projects will be licensed under GPL v3 by its second anniversary.

“The market is speaking for its acceptance,” said Levin. “I think the world is at a happy place.”

GPL v3 is off to a strong start, but it has a long way to go to catch up to GPL v2’s lead. Black Duck’s analysis showed that taken together, the three v3 licenses—AGPL, GPL and LGPL—include only a 2.14% share of the top 20 most commonly used licenses in open-source software projects. The two v2 license types, GPL and LGPL, control over two-thirds of the projects, a 68.56% share.

But consider that GPL v2 has a large installed base, Levin argued, as it’s been the GPL standard since 1991. Also, it takes a while to develop software, determine how to distribute it and decide how to encourage further development of it in the market. All of those factors would limit a mass migration from v2 to v3.

And the success of GPL v3 should not be measured by its “popularity,” but its ability to reach the strategic goals of the people who wrote it, said Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation.

“The license was revised to combat the most recent threats to free software,” wrote Brown in an e-mail interview. “So far we are very happy, because by our measure the license text has achieved the objective and neutralized those threats.”

Brown cited three particular goals of GPL v3: Fighting what he called the “TiVoization” of software, in which freedom to use the software in a device is thwarted by design restrictions of the hardware; eliminating the punitive aspects of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act that impose fines or even imprisonment for subverting digital rights management controls in software; and blocking discriminatory patent deals, a reference to the 2006 collaboration between Microsoft and Novell, in which Microsoft said it wouldn’t sue Novell customers—but would sue others—for alleged infringement of Microsoft patents.

“Increasingly, citizens don't want to be restricted by their software or electronic devices,” Brown wrote. As to companies that are reluctant to migrate from GPL v2 to v3, he lamented that they still “prefer to imprison their users.”

But there are practical considerations to choosing one license over another. For example, there’s the case of Sun Microsystems in its role as a sponsor of the Samba project, an open-source community that offers a free Windows file and printer sharing technology that is licensed under GPL v3, said Ian Murdock, Sun’s vice president of development and community marketing.

However, Sun’s Java software will likely continue under GPL v2, because v3 wasn’t finished when Sun open-sourced Java code, Murdock explained. And Solaris, which was released under Sun’s own common development and distribution license in 2005, won’t likely be licensed under v3. Sun would like to have the ZFS file system included in Linux distributions, he added, but since Linux remains under GPL v2, Sun will likely stick with the older scheme, since v3 isn’t backwards compatible with v2.

“When it comes to things like ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to put ZFS into Linux?’ the license and compatibility does become an issue,” Murdock continued. “So even if we did, for example, move to GPL v3 for Solaris, if Linux is still in GPL v2 that doesn’t help us get ZFS into Linux.”

Although similar complications may discourage a mass migration to GPL v3, Black Duck’s Levin thinks v3 adopters are likely to be those who see a particular appeal in provisions related to DRM and patent infringement, as well as startups with no history of using v2.

Related Search Term(s): Java, Linux, open-source development, Sun

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From the Editors: Time’s up for Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's current CEO, may be adept at technology, but he does have possess the business acumen to remain at its head. Also, agile development is showing itself to be a viable method, and enterprises should consider employing it.

Sun-Intel partnership bearing fruit Executives of Intel and Sun Microsystems report progress in their 18-month-long partnership, in which Sun servers now use Intel processors and Sun's Solaris operating system is optimized for Intel processors, including the soon-to-be-released Nehalem processor.

JavaOne was not just Sun's show While Sun was the major player at the JavaOne convention, a host of third-party companies also made their voices heard and showed off what they have to offer.

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