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The Free Software Foundation's birthday wishes for the GPL


By Alex Handy
February 15, 2009 — 
Twenty years on, the GNU Public License is the most popular free software license. And 25 years on, the GNU operating system has surpassed the old Unix world in popularity. The GNU operating system/Linux kernel combination has proved a powerful one-two punch, relegating all other 'nixes to the status of niche.

Today, the Linux kernel is the most well-known GPL-licensed project, but it's about to be joined by a completed OpenJDK, if the stars align this year. We asked software luminaries for their thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the GPL's creation and the 25th birthday of the GNU operating system.

 

Geir Magnusson Jr.
Apache Harmony Project lead and vice president of the Java Community Process at the Apache Foundation

Twenty years is a long time for anything in this industry, and the fact that the GPL is now this old is a testament to Richard Stallman's unique vision of "software freedom.”

The license has aged elegantly over the years, providing the foundation for, by some estimates, more than 50% of all free and open-source software. Its fundamental premise of compelling "share and share alike" has attracted a passionate, global community of developers and supporters, and much of the software that we take for granted today is under the GPL; the Linux operating system being the most notable example.

Recent updates to the license have made the GPL as modern as any other, keeping it relevant in an increasingly complicated IP environment. It will be interesting to see how the GPL continues to coexist with the less dogmatic, more permissive licenses such as the Apache License (to which I'm personally partial), and I look forward to seeing how the next 20 years unfolds for free and open-source software. It's going to be interesting.

 

Mark Shuttleworth
CEO and founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Second space tourist.

Future generations will come to depend heavily on a vast body of code and content that empowers all and yet is rigorously defensible in legal terms. The GPL was the pioneering effort that established the principles that underlie much of today's open and collaborative licensing: harnessing the global copyright system to establish a formal basis for copyleft and share-alike content. While the FSF is today part of a wider constellation of organizations, like the Creative Commons and the Software Freedom Law Center, it remains at the forefront of copyleft code licensing.

 

Simon Phipps
Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems

Twenty-five years ago was a time of change for the computer industry, just like today. The major vendor was wrestling with anti-trust suits. Disruptive technologies were taking the market beyond the incumbent hardware, with a new startup—Sun Microsystems—using an open Unix to bring innovative workstations to market. The software market was just coming into existence as vendors unbundled software and stopped providing source code.

This was the time in which the GPL was created. The parallels with today are obvious, and Richard Stallman's creation is just as fresh and relevant (and disruptive) as it was then. Sun is using both GPLv2 and GPLv3 more and more as a way to create the freedoms customers need to control costs and that communities need to collaborate. We've used it to liberate the Java platform, in xVM virtualization software and in many more of the products key to Sun's future.

The GPL, and the commons it creates, are still playing a crucial role creating the freedoms we need for our future.

 

Mike Milinkovich
Executive director of the Eclipse Foundation

The Free Software Foundation and specifically Richard Stallman deserve a lot of credit for being the pioneers that created the GPL 20 years ago. The Free Software movement has been a critical catalyst for change across the entire software industry.

Looking forward, I personally believe licenses like the Eclipse Public License and the Apache Software License have been instrumental in building strong, vibrant communities of individuals and companies around open-source technology. These licenses tend to be more inclusive of different philosophies of open-source participation and a wider variety of business models.


Related Search Term(s): GNU, GPL, Linux, open source, Unix, FSF, Sun


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33263
 

Comments

02/17/2009 05:32:06 AM EST

Thanks to the GPL License now we have more and better software, because when you share knowledge the social improve grows exponentially. Thanks to the people of the FSF, GNU, and those who continue making and licensing software under the GPL, but especially to Richard Stallman, who built their lead with a way to make a free society.

ColombiaDenis


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