Free Software Foundation releases GPLv3

…of the GNU software will follow in coming months. But some are being more cautious.

The primary consideration in moving the MySQL database software to GPLv3 is whether the new version will be adopted, said Kaj Arnö, vice president of community for the company.

"We're happy about many changes in text," Arnö said. "What still remains to be seen is the adoption. GPLv3 is still something people are asking questions about. Our logic is that we don't want to be those that answer those very first questions."

Sun, which selected GPLv2 to govern Java and, more unusually, the UltraSparc T1 processor design, is still evaluating the licence, said chief open source officer Simon Phipps. He did call GPLv3 "a strong and market-changing document", however.

Those who create software have some digesting to do, but for those who just use open-source software, GPLv3 will soon become routine, said James Harvey, an intellectual property attorney for Hunton & Willams and legal adviser to what he described as some of the largest companies using Linux today. "Once end users spend time with this licence, they will get more and more comfortable with it, and it will become another primary licence in their open-source rotation," he said.

Lowered barriers
In many cases, GPL software has been explicitly licensed under GPLv2 or later, in which case a programmer's software may be used in a project governed by both. But in cases where software is governed only by one or the other, there's a risk that software can't be moved back and forth, leaving code on separate islands.

One area that's a risk is with Linux and Solaris, Sun's version of Unix that's now becoming an open-source project under a different licence, the Community Development and Distribution License. Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said in May that he hopes GPLv3 could let Sun "converge on a uniform licence".

And there might be room for compromise: Torvalds said that a GPLv3 Solaris could coax him toward a GPLv3 Linux kernel. "I don't think the GPLv3 is as good a licence as (GPLv) 2, but on the other hand, I'm pragmatic, and if we can avoid having two kernels with two different licences and the friction that causes, I at least see the reason for GPLv3," he said earlier this month.

The licence barrier is less of an issue when, as is commonly the case, separate projects are in different domains and source code isn't tightly linked, as for example is the case with MySQL running atop Linux.

The new GPL also lowers barriers. For example, it's now compatible with the Apache License, a feature that pleases Jeremy Allison, one of the lead programmers behind Samba, a widely used file-server software project that's governed by the GPL. "Nothing is perfect," he said, but added, "I hope to see wide adoption of the GPLv3",

Broader GPL compatibility in GPLv3 will make life easier for MySQL if the company moves to the new licence, Arnö said. The MySQL database itself is under GPL, but so is "client" software that's used in other software that access the database. That's been a thorny issue because PHP, a project under a different open-source licence, often is used in conjunction with MySQL databases and uses that client software.

The licence initially was written by a programmer, but it's become decidedly more lawyer-oriented. For example, the provision regarding the Novell-Microsoft pact reads in part: "You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent licence (a) in connection with copies of the covered work conveyed by you (or copies made from those copies), or (b) primarily for and in connection with specific products or compilations that contain the covered work, unless you entered into that arrangement, or that patent licence was granted, prior to 28 March, 2007."

"The licence has gotten much easier for lawyers to deal with and probably not as easy for engineers to deal with," Harvey said.

But the legalese isn't entirely inappropriate, because lawyers at multibillion-dollar corporations now routinely deal with it. The GPL has moved into the mainstream.