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Oct. 19, 2009

Well-founded or not, good or bad, fair or unfair, criticism around open source licensing issues have been around for quite some time, and nobody expects to see them disappear overnight-- not by a long shot... The question of the day is: Can GPLv2 be legally full of holes and traps? Some think it's an open can of worms that's just about to decend upon the Linux and open source community.

Mark Radcliffe and Karen Coenhaver, both lawyers have already expressed some concerns that the way the GPLv2 is worded is in a very ambiguous manner and could lead to a lot of confusion, especially in the legal community.

According to them, today's U.S. copyright framework isn't well suited to today's modern IT industry. A term like "derivative work" may be reasonably easy to understand in the context of a book or a movie, but there are several levels more difficult in terms of software.

Radcliffe's and Copenhaver's criticism is that the GPLv2 mixes and matches the meanings of too many different things -- the meaning of "derivative work" for instance -- and that the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are better worded to suit the ambiguities of these potentially legal-challenging situations.

Case in point, Radcliffe goes on to say "I think the critical thing to recognize in the differentiation between GPLv2, GPLv3, and AGPLv3 is that there is a very strong effort to purposefully distance ourselves from copyright laws. Copyright law isn't stable and it changes over time. Worse, copyright laws vary a lot from country to country."

So does this means that Radcliffe and Copenhaver both believe copyright law is on its way out? It's too deeply entrenched and too genuinely useful to too many people for now, and when it changes it typically changes to favor the copyright owners.

Some parallel developments like Creative Commons will become both more respected and useful, but not in a way that makes copyright laws simply irrelevant either.

For now, there's little to suggest that GPLv2 isn't a defensible choice in the real world, where everything from the Linux kernel to FOSS (free and open source software) is concerned.

But what is really happening is a rapidly growing interest in the many licensing options apart from the GPLv2 -- both for the reasons cited above, and the fact that each license comes with its own world of software, developers and community contribution attached to it.

Linux and Open source software would not be where they are today without the protections afforded by copyright laws, but Radcliffe & Co think the situation might be different in the near future.

Others disagree. When you chose a specific license for a project, that speaks a great deal about what kind of work you want done with it and what you want other people to do with it. Overall, the GPLv2 still carries a great deal of weight in that respect and probably will for a long time to come.

However, the next few months will be critical to some. InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis on application delivery.

You can get it at http://apmreport.informationweek.com/?k=bxxe.

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Source: LNT.

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