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ARTICLE · 22 AUGUST 2008

An Open Source Community Divided Is GPLv3 A Blind Alley Or A Path To The Future?

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Last year, the first major revision in 16 years to the leading open source license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 (GPLv3), was released.

CanadaMedia, Telecoms, IT, Entertainment
Eric Boehm
Eric Boehm
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This article previously appeared in the Ontario Bar Association's Information Technology,, vol. 9, no. 2, June 2008.

Last year, the first major revision in 16 years to the leading open source license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 (GPLv3), was released.1 First promulgated in 1989 by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), GPL was last significantly revised in 1991 (with GPLv2). Since then, GPL has become extremely successful and has been adopted by a majority of open source projects,2 including most notably the popular Linux operating system in 1992. For this reason, the development of GPLv3 was hotly contested and widely followed.

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