The next GPL: Why it’s being shaped on GitHub

While you were getting ready to stick a fork in a burger for the Independence Day holiday, Red Hat employee Richard Fontana was making a fork of the GPL. Fontana previously worked at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a nonprofit law firm providing pro bono legal services to free and open source projects. He’s now the open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat, but he’s been careful to explain that the GPL fork is a personal project.

Fontana is more than qualified to work on evolving the GPL. Along with Gnu Project founder Richard Stallman and SFLC chief Eben Moglen, Fontana is credited as one of the main authors of the revised Gnu GPL version 3.

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The project to create that license was of epic proportions. Following publication of the initial draft in January 2006 by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a public consultation drew interest from throughout the world of open source software (I participated on behalf of Sun). With each round of consultation, Stallman, Moglen, and Fontana studied the feedback and drafted another version of the revised license. After four iterations, the final version of the GPLv3 we have today was published five years ago, on June 29, 2007.

GPLv3 was clearly a compromise

Despite all the consultative processes, further work was certainly needed on the GPL at the end of the process. Although the GPLv3 is showing early signs of success, it was a clear compromise.

The more radical free software advocates wanted the license to force Web service providers to deliver the source code to their Web applications if they used any GPL software. This is not currently a requirement of GPLv2 or GPLv3; providing the source code that corresponds to a particular GPL-licensed software program is mandatory only when you give the program to someone else. Run as a Web service, that doesn’t happen, so the GPL has almost no consequences for even the largest users of GPL software, such as Google.

The clauses to make the GPLv3 more radical were excised during the review. Instead, another license — the Gnu Affero General Public License (AGPL) — was created to include those clauses. (Fontana helped draft the AGPL as well.)

On the other hand, the corporate voices involved in the process were keen to streamline the license and make it simpler to understand, both for legal professionals and for businesspeople. Despite their concerns, the preamble to the GPL — a long philosophical statement explaining the rationale for having the license — was retained, along with a long postscript explaining how to apply the GPL to software.

For reasons he’s not yet explained, Fontana decided now was the time to create a non-FSF-sponsored revision of the GPL. Calling it GPL.next, he has created the project at the popular GitHub project hosting website. On the subject of naming, Fontana provides an interesting history lesson:

Contrary to what some believe, the “G” in “GPL” does not stand for “Gnu,” but “General”; “GPL” means “license to (or for) the general public.” As such, the name “GPL” seems generic. Indeed, the common use of “public license” in free software license names without the word “general” probably represents a historical failure to parse “GPL” correctly.

Why GitHub is the home for GPL.next

GitHub is becoming the preferred destination for innovative new open source projects of all kinds. An implementation of the Git version control system created by Linus Torvalds to host the Linux kernel, GitHub offers all the tools for a developer — even a license developer — to post text and collaboratively evolve it in public.

Anyone can fork a project on GitHub. Doing so creates a full copy of the project in a private space, letting you revise whatever you want. You can then offer your alterations to the original project creators by asking them to pull your changes into their version: a “pull request.”

Coupled with a built-in issue tracking system, GitHub provides an almost optimum instant governance for a new community that leaves every participant free to act as they wish.

Fontana is not the first to use GitHub as a venue for licensing work. Twitter has used GitHub for its innovative and interesting approach to disarming the software patent wars, the Innovators Patent Agreement, for example. He’s already attracted attention, with 22 people “watching” the project as of July 3 and a growing number of issues in the issue tracker seeking clarifications.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment progresses and whether GitHub really can provide a context for serious discussion and improvement of a complex legal agreement.

GPL.next’s proposed changes to the GPL

To date, Fontana’s changes mostly relate to the concerns of the corporate voices in the GPLv3 process. The preamble — “an inspiring and important political statement,” according to Fontana — has been removed, as has the “How to Apply” appendix. Those simple steps alone dramatically shorten the text.

The rest of the changes seem to fix apparently redundant compromises that made their way into the text as part of the negotiation process among all the corporate participants. Those include removal of text allowing the GPL to apply to hardware designs, the heading text for the liberty-or-death clause, and the removal of the clause permitting “badgeware.”

This may all seem esoteric, but the whole project provides useful insights. It shows the power of Git and of GitHub (and by implication any other Git host, such as Gitorious). It shows the willingness of the free and open source communities to think in public. Most of all, it shows that no matter how many people may believe that open source is a story that’s been fully told, there are new chapters yet to be written.

This article, “The next GPL: Why it’s being shaped on GitHub,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.