'Honest' open source licence aims to close GPL loophole

'Honest' version of GPL forces ASPs to give back to open source

An open source entrepreneur has to published a new 'Honest Public Licence' (HPL) that aims to close loopholes which let firms offering hosted applications escape key stipulations of the General Public Licence (GPL).

Fabrizio Capobianco published details of the proposed licence on his blog on Monday, and a first draft will be shared with the Free Software Foundation this week. 

Capobianco in the next month is solliciting feedback about this proposed changes and expects that his The HPL license over time will be folded into the forthcoming GPL version 3.

Capobianco is chief executive of Funambol, a company developing an open source alternative to Microsoft's ActiveSync application that does push email and synchronises data between computers and mobile devices.

The GPL is the most popular open source licence and governs the Linux operating system among others. It requires developers who distribute GPL-compliant code to publish the code for any adjustments they have made to the application.

Hosted providers offering applications such as Salesforce.com and Google's Gmail deliver a service but do not distribute any code. The code-sharing provision does not therefore apply to such providers. 

The loophole affects all kinds of applications that can be hosted, ranging from middleware like the Apache web server and Jboss application servers to enterprise software such as the SugarCRM suite.

A provider could, for instance, start offering a tweaked, hosted version of the SugarCRM enterprise suite without having to disclose its source code.

The HPL seeks to close that loophole by adding a single clause to the current GPL version 2 requiring application service providers to publish their source code. 

The GPL is based on the ideals of sharing source code as a way of paying back society for the free software.

But Capobianco claims that application service providers have been able to dodge their responsibilities owing to a technicality in the GPL licence.

• A podcast interview with Capobianco is available on the Silicon Valley Sleuth blog.

Open source developers would have to distribute their applications under the HPL licence for application providers to be affected by the code sharing requirement.

The loophole was brought to the attention of the open source community at last month's OSCON conference. 

In a debate with Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, publicist Tim O'Reilly argued that online applications made open source licences obsolete. 

O'Reilly stressed in a blog posting that he has warned about these issues since at least 1999.

But even though the online services loophole offers a way to turn an open source application into a proprietary application, it does not matter that much, according to Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata.

Haff questioned the belief that the GPL is a major factor in the success of Linux. Open source, in the meantime, has evolved into the world's most efficient development model.

"Today's reality is that open source has proved to be a very efficient development methodology in many contexts," Haff wrote on an Illuminata blog last week. 

"So while it may be possible for vendors to fork open source projects and offer their proprietary versions as services apart from the community, I do not see a big rush to do so."

• A podcast interview with Capobianco is available on the Silicon Valley Sleuth blog.