Following the release of GPLv3 draft 3, Bruce Perens and others seemed to focus on calling us names rather than responding our analysis and concerns about new license.  He was so vociferous in suggesting ACT was alone in our concerns, even we started wondering if he was right…

Thankfully, level of conviction does not seem to have a direct correlation with level of accuracy. In fact, there are others even in the Open Source community that share many of our concerns.   

Earlier this month, Allison Randal of O’Reilly Radar and Tim O’Reilly himself shared their concerns about the newest draft of the GPLv3.  Much of it sounded awfully similar, especially to Braden’s V for Vendetta post.  As Allison Randal said:

My fifth objection is a rule of discrimination: I’m fine with establishing a set of principles and building a community around them. People who want to follow the principles belong in the community, and people who don’t can find a different community to join. But when you start redefining the principles in order to keep out specific people, even though they followed your principles, that’s discrimination (not to mention being a little too much like a game of Calvinball). There’s no room for discrimination in free software, or in any movement promoting freedom.

Tim added that:

What bothers me here is the amount of attempted micromanagement of others that I see in this license draft.  For a license that’s supposedly about software freedom, it’s got an awful lot of detail on what people can and can’t do with the software. And as you note, it’s in the hands of a group that’s willing to reshuffle the cards, making the license a moving target.

In addition, Peter Galli over at eWeek reported today on a survey of Open Source Developers about the GPLv3.  Strangely, the glass-is-half-full headline, "Poll Shows Developer Support for GPLv3," doesn’t really fit the results of the survey.

According to this non-scientific study conducted by OpenLogic, a Broomfield, Colo.-based provider of enterprise open source software, the picture is a lot less rosy.

  • 47% of the 50+ developers interviewed thought the GPLv3 would be "good for open-source software."  That’s still less than 50 percent, so I wouldn’t call it overwhelming support…but it only goes down from here.
  • 59 percent were concerned about provisions around patent issues,
  • 53 percent were worried by the provisions around digital rights management,
  • 40 percent were concerned with the provisions around the use of GPL-covered programs in consumer devices (which is essentially the new DRM section)