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Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the current license, sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., to talk about his aims, hopes and wishes for the new license.
Tell me what you want to see going forward, now that the first draft discussion document for GPL 3.0 has been released.
I want to see a lot of people checking carefully for cases where these words wont do the right thing, so that we can fix them before the license takes effect.
This is just a discussion draft and is not yet a version of the GPL, and so does not apply to any programs. But we want any problems to be found before we make an official release of GPL Version 3 and, so, we need lots of people looking for problems.
How many people do you expect to take part in that process?
I cant guess, but others involved in the process expect it to be thousands. I have no expectations, as I dont know enough to guess. So I dont try.
How confident are you that this draft sets the framework for GPL 3.0?
Im pretty comfortable that, aside from little details, it is good, that it does the right things about the various issues that have come up.
You said the main issues for you were making the license more easily compatible with other free licenses, as well as DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the whole patent issue. Tell me your thoughts on these issues.
DRM is an attempt to crush the freedom that copyright law gives the public. It is completely evil. DRM does not deserve to be tolerated and should be wiped out. It is tolerated because governments are not very democratic and the rich have too much power over governments and the media.
So how much more pervasive do you think DRM will become?
I cant predict the future. What I can see is that powerful companies have already, to a substantial extent, imposed this on people.
Many audio and video works and transmissions are already only available in DRM formats and can only be understood by non-free software. There is no hope of making free software to handle it and in many countries that would be illegal.
They keep changing the Codec and so, even if you did some reverse engineering and figured out the format and what is needed to decode it—in a place where that was legal—soon there will be another Codec.
So what people have to do is reject these formats. People should never install these players. They have to stand up for their own freedom or they will lose it. That is what history has shown us for years.
Next Page: How GPL 3.0 will tackle DRM.
How GPL 3
.0 Will Tackle DRM”>
So what is the draft license actually doing about DRM?
It cant stop there from being DRM; all it can do is stop GPL-covered software from being perverted into part of a DRM system, and this is something that people have spoken about doing, people who thought that it was actually better to have supposedly free software twisted into DRM than have DRM implemented some other way.
Why do I say twisted? Its because although they would be using a program that was nominally free, in that its source code had a free software license on it, practically speaking, the users would not be able to exercise the freedoms that define free software, so it would not really be free software.
So we have put in provisions to make sure that they give you whatever signature codes are needed so that you really can run your modified version and it really can do what the original version could do, except it will do things a little differently whenever your modification happens to run. And if they wont do that, then they cant distribute at all because they would be distributing the code wrongly.
But we have not said that you cant put code into the program to do those things, what we have said is that you have to distribute enough keys such that the user can do those things and have full control over what he does.
How does the draft license address the whole issue of patents?
Well, again, we cant make patents go away by whatever we put in a software license. There is literally nothing that software developers can do to protect themselves against the dangers of patents, except not allow patents in their country. We have just found out that the European Union is going to make another attempt to impose software patents.
The need to have the GPL more compatible with other free licenses is one I have heard a lot about, as well as the issue of license proliferation. Your thoughts on this?
Were not interested in the Open Source Initiatives approval of licenses. Weve been judging licenses as to whether they are free software licenses many years before there was an OSI. Theyre entitled to have their own opinions and have nothing, particularly, to do with our movement.
So what we have done is not in any way changing the licenses that qualify as free software licenses; what we are doing is making the GPL compatible with a larger subset of that.
You see, some free software licenses are compatible with the GPL and some are not. If a free software license permits a modified version to be distributed under the GPL, then it is compatible with the GPL. We have artificially changed the GPL so that a larger range of those licenses will be compatible. The incompatibility is always unfortunate in itself, but the whole point of the GPL was to ensure that other restrictions cannot be added.
So, what was the fundamental basis for the previous incompatibility of some free licenses with the GPL?
In some cases they said things about certain trademarks, some had the requirement that you cant remove the command to download the source code, and then there are those with patent retaliation clauses. The Apache license is incompatible with GPL Version 2 because of a trademark clause and a patent retaliation clause, as I recall. I believe we have made both of those things compatible now.
But there are some free software licenses that have a patent retaliation clause that says if you sue us for patent infringement, no matter about what, then you lose the right to use this program.
Next Page: The future of free software.
The Future of Free
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Suppose some large companies with many patents were to release free software and then suppose they were to sue someone else for patent infringement, and then that somebody else tries to countersue, then our retaliation clause says he then loses the use of that program. So this is not retaliation, but rather simply reserves for the attack.
The kinds of patent retaliation that we are allowing are limited such that they are against things that are clearly wrong. So, some of the patent retaliation clauses fit into our criteria and are thus made compatible. We are hoping that, in the future, some of those license drafters will decide to make their patent retaliations compatible so that their licenses can be compatible.
Do you think it will be another 15 years until GPL 4.0?
I hope not. Its not as if we decided to wait 15 years. Five years ago we were already working on this. It is just that I got pretty busy and so I had to make a big block of time. Before, we made time to have a meeting for a day. That wasnt enough. This was three months of work to get it done. I had to decide not to travel during that time.
So, is the process now in the hands of the community?
No. I will still be making decisions. The committees are going to take all the comments and boil them down to issues. Then they will start addressing the issues and looking at the various options. They will also try and decide how to deal with these issues, but ultimately I will be making those decisions. And, of course, if the community has found a good solution, they make that job easy.
Is there a fundamental shift towards embracing free software and solutions?
Yes, there is a gradual movement towards support for free software. There are also a large number of people who half support it, people who say they are open-source advocates and who may develop free software, because most open-source software is free software, but dont look at the political and technical aspects of respecting a users freedom, and so they are missing the central part of issue. But what they do is often a good thing.
Is Microsoft the greatest threat to freedom in software?
It is a mistake to think of the free software movement as an alternative to Microsoft. When we started this, Microsoft was not particularly important. In 1984, the system that people normally thought of as the system to compete with was Unix. That is why we have GNUs Not Unix: It couldnt be GNUs Not Windows because there was no Microsoft Windows then.
Microsoft is simply one example of a proprietary software developer, a software developer that tries to subjugate users to keep them divided and helpless. So what we are campaigning against, and trying to help people escape, is not any company in particular, but an antisocial system where software developers put restrictions on the users.