FSF issues &#39;last-call&#39; GPLv3, encourages adoption
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InfoWorld - The Free Software Foundation has released the fourth or &quot;last-call&quot; draft of the third version of its GNU general public license, set a date for its official publication, and laid out reasons why the free and open source software community should adopt GPLv3 sooner rather than later.
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After the publication yesterday of what the Free Software Foundation terms as a "last call draft" - a final version for comments and revisions by the public - of the next version of the General Public License, Novell stated on its corporate blog that it's pleased to discover that draft language it believed would threaten its Linux business has apparently been removed.
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The older version better matches his vision of what a license should do. Plus, he said, "Because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I'm not just, I think, ethically bound by those people's choices, I am also actually legally bound."
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Two hot issues are making the rounds.  First, Debian and Firefox are having a spat, and the end result may be that Debian will distribute Firefox under a different name.  Second, the war betwen Linus Torvalds and other Kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation over GPLv3 is continuing, with Torvalds saying he's fed up with the FSF.  Here is my take on both, and related issues.
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TechWeb - One of the early adopters of GPL 3 will be the Samba Server project, which supplies file translation code between Linux and Windows.
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Let the countdown begin After months of pre-launch wrangling, legal jousting and clause tweaking, the Free Software Foundation is ready to launch the final version of the GNU GPL version 3. The champagne corks will officially pop at 12 noon, EDT, tomorrow, Friday June 29.â¦
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Blog: For all its sound and fury, the third version of the General Public License has not had much impact on the industry yet. Very few projects have adopted it. Here's why.
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After a year in development, The Mozilla Foundation has finally released the full &#39;official&#39; version of its already popular open-source Web browser, Firefox.
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Microsoft has revealed that its patent deal with Linspire doesn&#39;t cover the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the company&#39;s latest effort to distance itself from the GPLv3.
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The Free Standards Group (FSG) has announced the release of a specification that aims to help keep the Linux operating system from fragmenting and allow applications developed for one version of Linux to work on one another.
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InfoWorld - Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.
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The Free Standards Group (FSG) has revealed details of its Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0, a specification aimed at preventing Linux fragmentation.
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In an effort to help ensure standardization, the Free Standards Group has officially released the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0, a specification composed of interoperability standards, a base set of APIs and libraries and developer environments and test
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GPLv3 is either manna from heaven or fire and brimstone, depending on the survey you read.
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(InfoWorld) - The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel's thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations. Although the earlier GPLv2 has been used with Linux, GPLv3, released by the Free Software Foundation June 29, presents problems, according to James Bottomley, gatekeeper of the Linux Kernel SCSI Maintainership, which governs disk storage access in the kernel. The Linux kernel is not owned by any one person; it is owned by all the people who submit patches to it, Bottomley said. This means the kernel is now owned by anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 people, he said. "In order to change the kernel, we'd have to get everybody who owns the kernel to sign off on the re-licensing," said Bottomley, who also is CTO of SteelEye Technology and a member of the Linux Foundation board of directors. This would be required under copyright law, he said. This presents obvious practical problems should the keepers of the kernel decide they want to move to GPL v3. "We'd have to find all of the owners, first of all," Bottomley said. The lack of a compelling advantage to GPLv3 "means we're not going to bother," Bottomley said. A plebiscite could be announced to decide the issue, but a code contributor still could object to any switch, said Bottomley. "The choice at that point would be to rewrite their code or abandon the process," he said. The GPLv2 and v3 licenses are incompatible, he said. The Linux kernel will stick with GPLv2 for the foreseeable future, Bottomley said. Previously, Linux kernel developer Linus Torvalds has objected to GPLv3 because of concerns that digital rights management stipulations in the new license would be burdensome. The Free Software Foundation did not provide a response to Bottomley's claims on Thursday. The founder and president of the foundation, Richard Stallman, has advocated migrations to the new GPLv3 license for free software, emphasizing improvements in such areas as digital rights management and patent protection. Microsoft posted a statement on its Web site Thursday that said the company is not a party to GPLv3 and that none of the company's actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of the license. The company also said it assumes no legal obligations under GPLv3. "While there have been some claims that Microsoftâs distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law," Microsoft said. "In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future," Microsoft said. Under a multifaceted agreement with Novell, both companies agreed to not sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues; Microsoft through the arrangement can sell Novell subscription certificates for Suse Linux. Microsoft has decided the support certificates will not entitle the recipient to receive support or updates relating to code licensed under GPLv3. The full statement can be found here.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed up Thursday evening at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and declared he would not answer questions about the GNU general public license version 3, but he did disclose his lifelong fantasy concerning open source licensing. The GPLv3, which is expected to be released at noon on Friday, has been the focus of a public exchange between Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds over the future of open source licensing and the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux. Schwartz, who briefly stopped to talk to reporters, said he wants licensing to be kept simple. "I want to get to uniform licenses for everything we do," Schwartz said. "So if you look at Sun you say 'Oh, I know you. I get you.'" Schwartz did not say which license he was considering. Sun has developed its own open source license, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Then he added, "One of my great fantasies in life is that the number of people with opinions on open source licenses will come roughly into balance with the number of people who have read them." "Go read the Mozilla license," he said. "It is very difficult for an international company to use it because it is for the [United States] only. What do I tell people in China? Sorry, if you have a gripe you need to come back to Santa Clara," he said with a laugh. Schwartz then took the stage and joked with the audience, thanking them for Sun's fourth-quarter revenue. He then talked about helping customers to condense their infrastructure by consolidating workloads, to run virtualized infrastructure at scale, and to develop compelling services. He singled out identity as one of those services. He then laid out Sun's position on open source software and licensing. "The core value of Sun comes down to a basic set of things," he said. "Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity." "We're every way thinking to combine the communities because we think that gives us the critical mass to go after the big opportunities in the marketplace." Shortly afterward Schwartz welcomed questions from the crowd, but added "just not about GPLv3, please." Earlier this month, Torvalds used the Linux Kernel Mailing List to slam Sun in responding to a post about Sun and open source licensing: "You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that Sun is in this to actually further some open source agenda." He then launched into a "cynical prediction" slamming Sun's licensing interests around the OpenSolaris kernel and GPLv3, and predicting Sun would use licensing to protect patents on its ZFS file system rather than make it freely and widely available to the open source community. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and kernel developers have said there is little chance the Linux community would move to the new GPLv3 because it is not significantly better than GPLv2 and could take six months or more to convert all the components of the kernel. "A GPLv3-only release [of the OpenSolaris kernel] would actually let [Sun] look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," Torvalds wrote. A day later, Schwartz responded on his blog in a friendly tone disputing Torvalds contention the Linux hurts Sun and saying Linux was not the enemy. Schwartz, writing on his blog, addresses Torvalds personally: "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense." Like the licensing, there also was no word Thursday night about dinner.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF''s goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a license should do, Torvalds said.?"I want to pick the license that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3," said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation. He was interviewed in late-October by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.Among GPL 3 highlights are protections against patent infringement lawsuits and provisions for license compatibility. Torvalds acknowledged he had spoken out against GPL 3 before it was released. He had opposed digital rights management provisions in early-2006, calling them burdensome.There could be a change in his stance, though, Torvalds said. GPL 2 basically has acted as a single license covering a huge bulk of source code. Version 3 splits this base with some projects covered by version 2 and others by version 3 or later, he said. Version 3 might be useful if "there ends up being tons of external code that we feel is really important and worthwhile that is under the version 3 license," said Torvalds.He added he cannot change the license on his own anymore. "I mean, because I have accepted code over the last 15 years by people who kind of accepted my original choice of the GPL Version 2, I?m not just, I think, ethically bound by those people?s choices, I am also actually legally bound," Torvalds said.Torvalds also was asked about the Linux development process being centered in North America and Europe despite Linux's now-global reach. Developers, Torvalds said, tend to come from countries with a high density of Internet access. While China and India have a lot of people, they have issues with Internet access, he said.Language and cultural barriers also present an issue. While some Asian countries have huge Internet use and a great deal of education, they do not contribute a lot to the kernel or other open-source projects, said Torvalds. South Americans, meanwhile, may not necessarily speak English but culturally, they are closer to Europe and the U.S., which makes it easier to enter the fray, according to Torvalds.?Asked why the kernel does not have a stable device driver ABI, Torvalds said one reason is that people ask for one but do not want to merge their source code into the stable kernel or the standard kernel."And that, in turn, means that all the people who actually do all the kernel work and maintain the kernel are basically unable to work with that piece of hardware and that vendor because if there are any bugs whatsoever, we can?t fix them," said Torvalds.Commercial vendors have moved away from wanting anything to do with binary drivers because they are not maintainable, he said.Torvalds said Linux started out as a hobby of his, but he has now been working on it full-time for the last four years.