God bless Richard Stallman
January 19, 2006I’ve never met Richard Stallman, but judging from his picture and his statements at a recent public forum, the guy’s a bit of a fanatic. But God bless his particular brand of fanaticism, because it has given us the open source movement.
The General Public License, created by Stallman and propogated thru his GNU and Free Software Foundation projects, is the legal cornerstone for much of the open source software community. It’s been almost 15 years since version 2.0 of the GPL came out, and Stallman is finally starting the public comment period for GPL 3.
It’s going to be contentious, since it sounds like Stallman plans to be very hard-nosed about some of the items in GPL 3 especially around patent litigation. I’m glad he chooses to stand his ground but I do wonder if the hard-nosed approach won’t turn off some current GPL users. If I had to guess, I’d say that some percentage of current GPL projects will decide not to move to GPL3. Not certain if that means they can stick with the current GPL, or will have to move to some other license.
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