I completely missed this on my quick read-through of GPLv3 (Draft 3) yesterday. The FSF, as Fabrizio rightly declares, completely neutered the GPL for the 21st Century of software. (Note to the FSF: Never upset an Italian. It's not pretty.)

That means 75% of the future software (which is going to be SaaS) could be offered by leeches, that suck the soul of open source for their pure benefit. They make money, while others work for them for free, to make them rich. Rich without returning anything that could benefit the community of whom they are parasites. As you can read in this interview, Google is really happy about the GPLv3 draft. Of course they are!!

I am honestly upset. My feeling is that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) did not have the [guts] to push this forward. I can understand it, because the special interests involved are big and you need to pick your fight. But they picked the wrong ones. Covering the use of open source in SaaS was the one to fight. You cannot go after TiVo because puts Linux in a box, but not after Google because it puts it behind a firewall. Just because it is Google. The vast majority of software will be run as a service, not in appliances. The world is not going there. The world is going SaaS.

Fabrizio is right. 100% right. The worst part is that it makes absolutely no sense why they did this. The ASP loophole closure was part of Section 7, which includes optional components, which you can remove from the license. Yes, this breeds complexity (which version of GPLv3 are you using?), but in larger projects (like Linux) I believe we'd see a herd effect (everyone going with or without the anti-ASP clause), and in other projects...who cares?

I was pushing for my company to use GPLv3, but the FSF just removed the number one reason to do so (and, I believe, the number one reason for many commercial open source applications to do so). The FSF, as Bryan Richards suggests, just made Linux and a lot of GPL'd software irrelevant to the future, in order to potentially preserve today's status quo.

Bad decision. Google wouldn't go out of business tomorrow if GPLv3 allowed for the closure of the ASP Loophole. Neither would Salesforce.com or others that make use of modified, GPL'd Linux. But hordes of open source applications could come into business through the protections of freedom that closure of the Loophole would have afforded.

I never would have thought RMS and Eben would capitulate....I was wrong. Bryan writes:

The future is networked. The GPL isn't.

Bruce Perens wrote in a recent article that if Novell didn't adopt the GPL3 with the provisions blocking their patent agreements with Microsoft then it "may freeze them in amber as an example of the state of software in early 2007." Maybe. But with the this latest draft of the GPL3, the Free Software Foundation may have served up a license that best represents the software of 1989 and have transformed a loophole into a tunnel you can drive a truck through.

Amen. A very sad amen.

Posted by Matt Asay on March 29, 2007 03:58 PM