What happens when two of open source’s most controversial reformers decide the old rules no longer work? Are you ready for the license that could change everything?
Not quite four months after they both lost bids for board seats at Open Source Initiative, Richard Fontana and Bradley M. Kuhn are at it again. Not only that, they’re continuing to work on open source licensing issues. Last week they announced the launch (or relaunch—I’ll explain later) of Copyleft-next, a project to develop a next-generation copyleft open source license.
On June 30, when they made the announcement, they pointed out that this is important because an entire generation has passed since GPLv3–the last broad-stroked copyleft license–arrived on the scene:
“Today, GPLv3 turns exactly 18 years old. This month, GPLv2 turned 34 years old. These are both great licenses and we love them. Nevertheless, at least once in a generation, FOSS needs a new approach to strong copyleft.”
In case you don’t know, both Fontana and Kuhn have long been involved with open source projects.
Fontana, a lawyer, served three years (2005-2008) as Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center. During that time he was one of the three principal authors—alongside Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen—of the GNU General Public License version 3, the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3, and the GNU Affero General Public License. Currently employed by Red Hat, he spent six years–January 2013-January 2019–on OSI’s board.
Kuhn’s career in open source started in 2000 when he was hired full time by the Free Software Foundation. A year later he signed on as the organization’s executive director and served in that position until early 2005, when he took the role of policy analyst and technology director at Software Freedom Law Center. In 2006, he became the organization’s first president, and in 2010 became its first Executive Director. In 2014 he stepped down from those roles, but has remained on board as a “policy fellow” and “hacker-in-residence.”
“Both of us were involved with the drafting committees of GPLv3, and we learned much from what was done right and (frankly) what was done wrong in drafting GPLv3,” they said in their joint statement announcing Copyleft-next.
Fontana, Kuhn, and the OSI Election
Although Fontana walked away from OSI’s board in 2019 due to term limits, he ran again this year in what ended up being a controversial election. He was joined in that election by Kuhn, and the two ran on a joint reform platform that advocated changes in OSI governance along with the repeal of the organization’s recently adopted Open Source AI Definition. Debian developer Luke Faraone also attempted to run on the same platform, but his nomination was refused due to a poorly defined nomination deadline that many think was invented.
There were other irregularities in this election that in previous years would have resulted in an election do-over. In this election, however, OSI leadership–already under fire for its unpopular USAID–circled the wagons and took a hard line approach.
After voting had ended, OSI pulled a switcheroo and required all candidates to sign a board member agreement before results would be counted. Fontana and Kuhn returned signed agreements, but with a controversial clause calling for all board members to publicly support all board decisions struck out. OSI rejected the amended agreements and excluded both from the count.
Since then, both Fontana and Kuhn have publicly called for the actual number of votes cast each candidate to be made public, and have used various platforms to call for more transparency from OSI.
Looking Forward: Copyleft-Next
For all intents and purposes, last week’s announcement constitutes a new launch, although it’s being presented as a reboot. That’s because of the 2012 organization by the same name and with nearly the same purpose that Fontana launched as a fork of the GPLv3 project–which in some ways makes the new endeavor a carryover.
That organization was active for four years, until 2016. It had a public git repository, a publicly archived mailing list, and included open calls for contributions from developers, not just lawyers. While there was a small core group of regular contributors–the 14 contributors listed on the project’s original GitHub page–the project actively encouraged input from a broader pool of developers and legal experts.
For this new organization, Kuhn and Fontana will serve equally as co-Editors-in-Chief and will use the Hindering Backchannels Rule, which was developed for the original project as a way of maintaining transparency.
Kuhn’s bosses at Software Freedom Conservancy are helping out by supplying some infrastructure, as well as by allowing Kuhn to spend four hours weekly toiling for Copyleft-next on their dime:
“For the last year, Bradley has been slowly making the case internally to ask SFC to provide resources (in the form of infrastructural support and Bradley’s staff time) to relaunch copyleft-next. We are pleased to announce that SFC has agreed! SFC will provide system resources to host our website, mailing list, and Forgejo instance for the copyleft-next project, and Bradley will dedicate at least four focused hours/week to the project. Bradley has also created a Mastodon instance for fediverse updates.”
In addition, the organization is already up and running with its own website, and with a domain name that’s a good fit:
“A gracious volunteer years ago donated to Bradley the domain name ‘copyleft.org’ as a place to host work to advance copyleft. We’re excited to host all these new resources in that domain name.”
“Relatedly, while SFC has agreed to host and sponsor this project, SFC is currently neutral on the question of whether SFC should be the official license steward of copyleft-next. We have seen various problems regarding stewardship of licenses (even by nonprofit charities), and we expect the issue of ‘Does copyleft-next need a steward to succeed?’ will be an immediate topic of early discussion. We both consider that still an open question.”
Considering that it was 16 years after GPLv2 that GPLv3 arose, and that 18 years has passed since then, it might be high time that we start redefining copyleft for the mid-21st century world.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
There may be reasons why GPL V3 needs to be changed, but I do not believe that “age” is one of them. Even if there are legitimate reasons why it should be changed, I would urge caution.
Finally, it should be recognized that it is possible that only projects that have centralized copyright ownership will be able to take advantage of changes to the license. There is a reason why the Linux kernel is stuck on GPL V2.x even though for lots of reasons GPL V3 is better.