A quiet revolution is getting its act together. A bold proposal called a mutual defense software license is emerging as a type of poison pill for the open source community.The proposal is being developed by Larry Rosen and was supported and articulated today by open source evangelist Bruce Perens at LinuxWorld. In essence, if Linux were licensed under a mutual defense license, any company that sued any single Linux developer would have its rights to use Linux terminated. As with all things legal, the details are complicated. Perens himself said at a press conference this morning that he is still unsure about the anti-trust implications, for example.Then you have the issue of how the GNU General Public License would be changed for Linux to be governed by this sort of license. It’s something that the GPL’s author, Richard Stallman is not keen to do, according to Perens: “It’s hard for Richard to add more restrictions to IP software.” At the core of the argument is the notion that the open source community needs a mechanism by which to defend and protect the integrity of what Perens said is one of the few social movements to actually create products. So under this legislation, the penalty for breaching your obligations as a mutual patent holder is clear, according to Perens. “We should at least deny them [vendors] the right to make money from our software.”The biggest issue facing the open source movement, Perens argues, is that large bodies like the European Parliament are moving to oppose open source because, in their words, “it’s not economi-cally significantly.” You only have to look at around the floor of LinuxWorld Expo to understand that statement is wrong. [More on Europe software patent issues here. ]There’s another twist to this story. Perens said while companies like IBM have proved themselves to be strong supporters of Linux, they threaten the integrity of open source software though aggressive patents. For example, IBM has taken an adversary position in Europe, Perens claims. “There is no question that IBM is one of the major parties advancing the software patenting issue to Europe.” Bob McMillan, a reporter at InfoWorld affiliate IDG News Service who was also at the Perens press conference, cornered Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s e-Business on Demand General Manager, after his keynote this morning. Wladawsky Berger seemed surprised to hear of Perens’ comments. “The question has never come up with Linux,” he said. IBM’s history of working with open communities like the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) should reassure developers,” he said, but he encouraged Perens to contact IBM to discuss the issue.(Thanks to Bob McMillan for real-time collaboration on this piece. We might not have a copy desk at Tech Watch, but fact-checking is alive and well.) Technology Industry