GPLv3 and the Free Software Movement
Free Software Foundation Europe
Who am I?
- I work full-time for FSFE - a sister of FSF
- I help participation in policy setting
- Software patents, EUCD
- ISO and OOXML
- GPLv3
What is free software?
- 0. Run it for any purpose
- 1. Study and modify
- 2. Distribute copies
- 3. Distribute modifications
60s, 80s, now
- In the 60s and 70s, most were free
- In the 80s: technical and legal restrictions
- Copyright covers all works
- To escape it, you have to write it down
Free Software licences
- Anyone can write a free software licence
- Some free software licences already existed
- The X Window System was one...
Protecting freedom
- X Window System was free
- But users didn't have freedom
- Middlemen were removing the value
- A similar thing was done to FreeBSD by Apple
Copleft
- You cannot add more restrictions
- If you add some code, it has to be as free
Many licences
- Emacs General Public License
- GCC General Public License
- Each copyleft licence is incompatible
- Two licences saying "This and no more" can't be
compatible
- So one GNU General Public License, in 1989
GPLv1
- GPLv1 said you must make source code available, if you
distribute binaries
- And it said modified works can't have extra
restrictions
GPLv2
- v2 was released in 1991
- It said that if you are unable to give people all the
freedoms, you can't distribute the software
- This meant that patent holders couldn't profit from
restricting free software
- This protected free software because if they can't
profit, they're not interesting in harming us
Other licences
- In the late 90s, a lot of companies wrote new licences
- They were often incompatible
- Later, projects merged back toward GPL
- Mozilla, Qt toolkit, Java
- Today, GPL is used by 70%
- Licence proliferation is bad, but these let us see new
ideas
Why now?
- Technology changed
- Laws changed
- The free software community change: it grew
- ...so the licence was changing anyway
This is the easy way
- To make our life easier, as developers, users, and
businesses
- We can lobby, which takes years and moves inches
- We can use market power - but we're currently wasting that
- Those are ways of affecting external factors
- Copyright gives us this concession: we write our own
licences - this is the easy bit
A foreseen problem
- A problem was obvious: v3 would be incompatible with v2
- It had to be, they were two copyleft licences
- This was forseen, FSF did two things:
- 1. Centralised copyright
- 2. Asked people to say "v2 or any later version" - and
people did
A global process
- Because people agreed to "or any later version", we had
to make people aware
- A public process was devised
- It was supposed to last 12 months. It lasted 18.
- There were conferences around the world, with separate funding.
Records of that process
- Thousands of comments collected on gplv3.fsf.org
- Transcripts at http://fsfe.org/transcripts
The flow
- Comments were collected on gplv3.fsf.org
- They went to four committees
- The committees discussed them in their own ways
- Richard made the final decision
Pleasing everyone
- Richard made the final decision, but he didn't get his way
- GPLv3 had to be acceptable if it was to be of any use
- Some compromises are in there
The changes
- Internationalisation
- Tivoisation
- European Copyright Directive
- Patents
- Licence compatibility
Internationalisation
- Not very interesting
- Maybe the most important change
- Using international language - no USA focus
- Using legally solid language
Tivoisation
- A type of DRM: Devices Rigged to Malfunction
- You get the freedoms, but the computer won't let you
enjoy them
- Giving people what they want: Let them remove spyware
- Basic survival: A generation of non-programmable
computers means a generation of non-programmers
- A compromise: only for user devices
European Copyright Directive
- This law says it's illegal to circumvent a software
system to get at copyrighted material
- ...even if you want to do something legal
- EUCD is a new power for software developers
- GPLv3 disclaims that power
Patents
- Explicit patent grant
- Turning the Novell patent deal against itself
Licence compatibility
- Tried to be compatible with as many as possible
- In the end, it's compatible with Apache
- ...and maybe some others
End result
- Many GNU programs use GPLv3, including GCC
- Samba uses GPLv3
- There have been no problems found
- There has been a vacuum of bad press