I’m sure you are already aware, but today is a big day! REALLY BIG! 10 years in the making, the Free Software Foundation will finally release version 3 of the General Public License to the world. It is the Pride and Joy of Stallman and Moglen and the potential savior of the Free Software cause!
So, as a "PR guy" I find today’s timing very interesting. Given the importance of this announcement, why would they bury it on the Friday before (for all intents and purposes) a holiday weekend? And isn’t there something else kinda important going on today???
Oh yeah, and on the same day as the biggest news story to hit the tech industry in years. The day when every single tech reporter in the world is covering something else!!! A day where Steven Levy was nearly mugged for his iPhone on LIVE TV!! The day that will go down in history, not as the day Eben Moglen paved the way for Free Software glory in his final act as the FSF’s counsel, but as the day that the proprietary iPhone revolutionized the mobile phone world.
Yet, I still think it is a Brilliant move by the Free Software Foundations’ PR team. It’s the equivalent of George Bush announcing he’s pardoning Scooter Libby and Jack Abramoff on Christmas Day.
The reality is that the future of the GPLv3 is looking pretty grim. Despite the ruckus over the Microsoft-Novell deal, nearly the entire commercial open source community announced that it has no intentions of ever using it! If the entire LAMP stack doesn’t use it, is it even relevant anymore?
If the FSF had chosen a different day to launch the GPLv3, there would likely be a lot more mainstream stories about the new license. Unfortunately for them, they would probably focus almost entirely on how many people are planning NOT to use it. Not the few, relatively insignificant projects that are. These articles would likely have mused about the relevance of the GPLv3 and even the relevance of the FSF in the post GPLv3 world.
In the end it is far better to have relatively few stories from your FLOSS reporting community, than a lot of negative ones from the rest of the world! Kudos to You, FSF PR Guys!