One Month On, GPLv3 Adoption Going Very Smoothly
ciaran
|
Wednesday 01 August 2007
|
I recently read the discussion on
the GCC
development mailing list related to GCC's transition
to GPLv3.
Despite generating 172 emails, the transition was quite smooth
actually.
I decided to read about GCC's transition because I wanted to
investigate a (false) claim which Slashdot featured on their front
page. Slashdot's story, which I now know to be complete rubbish,
claimed that
key
GCC developers were talking about forking GCC.
Actually, they mostly discussed version numbers, as well as the
copyright status
of code
written by scripts, and
of World
War II photographs, etc.
About the version number, DJ Delorie argued against bumping the
version number up to 4.3.0 for the new licence
because Slashdot
might print a negative story about GCC 4.3.0 not having the
features previously scheduled for that version number. Which is
pretty funny in hindsight because the developers finally agreed not
to bump the number up to 4.3.0, and Slashdot still printed a
negative story. It seems there's no getting around the fact that
Slashdot just loves controversy, even when it means creating
anti-free-software FUD.
So, in
review, Samba's
GPLv3 transition went well. Then
SugarCRM ditched their
custom licence and moved to GPLv3,
which, as I
said, is one way in which GPLv3 tackles licence proliferation.
And now GCC
and 286 other
projects have made the transition, according to Palamida's GPLv3
counter. It seems that GPLv3 transitions are going quite smoothly.
In fact, it seems that many commentators have been surprised (and
some have surely been disappointed) by the lack of major problems.
There is a vacuum of bad press, which is why Slashdot has resorted
to printing hallucinations,
and InformationWeek
can only publish bad news by inventing it. All in all, I'd
chalk that down as a success for the eighteen months of hard work
that was the GPLv3 consultation process.
--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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