The snowballing success of Linux has attracted involvement from all corners of the computing realm -- but the breadth of that interest is expected to complicate a revision of the software's legal underpinnings.
The heart of the operating system is governed by a licence called the GNU General Public License, or GPL, last updated in 1991 but now being modernised. A key lawyer involved in that work, though, says the revamp won't be done until 2006 at the earliest.
When a draft of the new licence is released, the debate will be contentious and resolving the issues will take at least one year, predicted Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation that oversees the licence.
"It has survived at present for almost 14 years. I think it is more or less inevitable it will see its 15th birthday," Moglen said in a speech at the OSDL Linux Summit this month.
Releasing a new licence in 2006 or even 2007 may seem a long way off, but it's not when compared with the 100-year planning horizon of GPL creator and FSF founder Richard Stallman, Moglen said. "It is going to be a screaming match some days, but it is going to be a noble effort when it's over," Moglen said. And in the end, "Nobody, dare I say even Mr. Stallman, will get from this process everything he wants."
The licence is being modernised to deal with new realities in the computing industry, such as widespread patenting of software (in the US), computers that will run only software that has been digitally signed and hosted software services.
Scrutiny of the licence is increasing as the free and open source software projects it governs become promoted by mainstream computing companies and more widely used by conventional customers. And even though the SCO Group is having serious trouble with its $5bn lawsuit against IBM -- alleging that Big Blue violated a contract by moving proprietary Unix software to open source Linux -- the case has served to bring even more attention to open source issues.
Licensing issues are assuming a higher profile at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston this week. While numerous corporate allies such as IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Novell and Oracle will show their Linux faith at the show, small start-ups specializing in the licensing issues will also be on hand.
One start-up, Black Duck Software, plans to announce at LinuxWorld that it's signed up one of the largest software companies, SAS Institute, as a customer for software to make sure open source and proprietary software isn't being intermingled. And Black Duck now has competition: At the Linux show on Tuesday, a rival called Palamida will announce itself and its product.
But the legal scrutiny, while burgeoning, isn't alien to the GPL. When Stallman launched his Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) effort to clone Unix in the 1980s, he crafted the first GPL not just to govern the software but also to try to create a legal framework that would guarantee that GNU would never be fettered by proprietary shackles.
So far the licence has succeeded admirably. "It's been very successful in accelerating the acceptance and use of open source licensed products," said Brian Kelly, an intellectual-property attorney with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
The licence has its detractors, however.
