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GPL to get a makeover

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 23 Dec 2004 16:10 GMT

Another requirement is that GPL software may be tightly integrated only with other software that also is governed by the GPL. That provision helps to create a growing pool of GPL software, but it's also spurred some to label the licence "viral", raising the spectre that the inadvertent or surreptitious inclusion of GPL code in a proprietary product would require the release of all source code under the GPL. Gates in particular derided the licence as "Pac Man-like", evoking an image of a GPL software module gobbling its way along and forcing the release of source code it touches.

Thus far, that scenario hasn't come to pass. The GPL, though, has threatened Microsoft in another way: It helped foster a vast, vibrant programming community.

Microsoft is keenly watching the arrival of the new GPL, which Stallman said is likely to be labelled version 3. But the company probably won't see changes to that core provision separating GPL and proprietary code.

"Overall it's going to be the same," the globe-trotting Stallman said in a telephone interview from Morocco. "I don't expect anyone releasing software under the GPL to be unhappy with the changes."

Changes aren't going to happen anytime soon, though. "We're nowhere near ready to have anything to show people anything yet. We know what we'd like to do, but how to do it is not clear," Stallman said. Only when he's good and ready will he begin seeking comments on a draft.

Stallman wrote the GPL in the 1980s as part of his GNU project to create a clone of the operating system unfettered by Unix's proprietary constraints -- thus the term "free software" and the Free Software Foundation that Stallman established to promote it.

According to Freshmeat, which calls itself "the Web's largest index of Unix and cross-platform software", there are more than 19,000 GPL-covered software projects, and the GPL governs 68 percent of projects in the Freshmeat index.