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Open Source License Proliferation: Helpful Diversity Or Hopeless Confusion?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
Open Source License Proliferation: Helpful Diversity Or Hopeless Confusion?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
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A decade ago, I observed that licenses were the "unnoticed force" behind free and open source software ("FOSS"). Since then, legal scholarship on FOSS licensing has gone from a trickle to a torrent. Likewise, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists (among others) have begun to focus on FOSS licensing, each from their own academic perspectives. FOSS programmers themselves (known as "hackers" in the FOSS community) have refocused on FOSS licensing, most notably by revising the most venerable FOSS license, the GNU General Public License ("GPL"), for the first time in more than fifteen years.
One prominent issue among hackers and business …
General Public License 3.0: Hacking The Free Software Movement's Constitution, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
General Public License 3.0: Hacking The Free Software Movement's Constitution, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
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The General Public License (GPL) enshrines a software hacker’s freedom to use code in important ways. Hackers often refer to the GPL as the free software movement’s “constitution.” Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) wrote the most recent version of the GPL, version 2.0, back in 1991. For a constitution, a fourteen-year-old document is young, but for a license, it is quite old. The revision process is finally underway, led by Stallman and Eben Moglen, FSF’s general counsel.
The release of GPL version 3.0 will be momentous for many reasons, but one reason stands out: The GPL …