Open Source GPL Rewrite On Fast Track?

Yes, the license that everyone simultaneously lives by and seems to disagree with is going to be revised. Sooner than later, or so it seems by the article. We’ll have to wait to see if it’s good or bad.

NEW YORK - Seeking to relieve patent licensing worries by the open-source community, industry heavyweights here at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo said a revised version of the GPL could arrive sooner than many had expected.

At a LinuxWorld panel, Eben Moglen, the legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, said that the first public draft of the GNU General Public License 3 will be available for comment shortly.

“It won’t be long before the first public draft of the GPL 3 will be out, and it will include clauses on how to conduct patent defense,” he said.

The GPL is the most widely used free software license.

Moglen estimated that 65 percent to 70 percent of all open-source projects were licensed under the GPL, which had its last major update in 1991.

Since then, change in the software industry—such as the rise of the importance of software patent issues and questions about how the GPL handles derivate works - has made an update necessary.

Part of the push behind a revised GPL, many LinuxWorld attendees suggested, is not to create simply another license, but to create a better GPL that can garner popular support and solve the most glaring problems found with the current version.

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