GPL3 is about to alienate many of the people that made it a success.

So today Linus Torvalds launched a full-out assault against the proposed revisions of the premier open source license. He said that he wouldn't adopt the license for the Linux kernel because of its controversial statements about digital rights management technology (DRM).

The controversy is centred around a provision in the license draft that would prevent developers from using a GPL3-licensed application together with DRM. Practically TiVo would be unable to use Linux to power its digital video recorder boxes (as it does today) if Linux would adopt GPL3. The same would go for GPS navigation devices, media adapters, etc. etc.

The draft for version 3 of the GPL was in part drafted by Richard Stallman, and the battle against DRM is one of his pet projects. 

Needless to say that a GPL3 governed Linux would be a gift from heaven for Microsoft (or Sun Microsystems, in pushing OpenSolaris), as very few organisations would be able to use it without violating the license.

Linux is the premier example of a GPL application. The GPL in fact governs the vast majority of all "open source" software, even though there are about 70 different open source licenses.

The inclusion of the DRM provision would effectively render GPL3 useless for the vast majority of this world's users. It could be that the Free Software Foundation really wanted to create a license that takes open source to the furthest most extreme, making it more of a political statement than a practical tool.

In that case the GPL2 will be around for many years to come.

Stallman protesting Sony's DRM

Tags: GPL, richard stallman, linus torvalds

27 Jan 2006