GNU GPLv3 turns 10

fsf.org

19 points·tjr··5 comments

It's been a failure in my opinion. The benefits of the patent licensing clause did not win out over the massive loss of the likes of Apple, the BSDs etc. shunning GPLv3 software.

It also spurred a lot of rewrites of GPL software. This has been good for the most part, but the opposite of what the FSF intended.

I believe Stallman has stated in the past that it was never about the amount of software under the license; in that case, the GPL would have been a failure if it fails in accomplishing its aims with any particular piece of software licensed under it, and to my knowledge that hasn't happened (yet).

Perhaps oddly, the only software which I know is currently open source thanks to the GPL is Linux, as I imagine there might be more Linux distros that are proprietary (or at least, the kernel would be) if it was not under the GPL. That said, I still license my own software under the AGPL if it's something big or something I'm particularly proud of. The rest goes under public domain (CC0).

CC0 is not a great license for code weirdly enough. OSI never approved it as an open source license because of a clause about patents. https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

I selected GPLv2 for distributing a project even with the availability of v3. I see others who did this as well.

Version 2 is readable by mere mortals; simplicity is a feature.

I was also surprised by the boilerplate "version x or any later version", seems strange to give away something under terms that don't even exist yet -- and I'd be interested if this actually weakens the assertion of the license.

Without covering services or non-distributed applications, it doesn't do a whole lot in this day and age.

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