[consulting] GPL v3, contributions and effect on community

[Henri Poole]

Even if Dries and the Drupal developers moved to GNU-GPL v3 (and
assuming that the current draft 7.b.4 regarding web services stays),
there is no requirement to open the services loophole on Drupal with
that move. The move to GNU-GPL v3 would just enable new works (done by
members of the community) to carry the additional download source
terms. 

Actually, this could be a positive move to those who want to make sure
that their modules or other enhancements are required to maintain open
in a web services environment and therefore bring a larger community of
users to Drupal. There are numerous developers who have adopted the
Affero General Public License specifically for this reason.

The Drupal team would not be required to add those derivative works to
core, and therefore 'open' the services loophole for the rest of Drupal.

As Dries wrote "Personally, I don't see us adding such a clause to
Drupal", he has indicated that there is no intent to add a clause to
Drupal core, but this does not require staying with GNU-GPL v2. Drupal
could safely move to v3 without opening the services loophole.

- Henri Poole
Partner of CivicActions, FSF Board Member

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 20:06 -0700, Dan Robinson wrote:
> > Dependent upon maybe too strong of a word, but keeping some key source
> > code/custom module may introduce a competitive advantage that a business
> > wants to exploit as long as possible.
> >
> > I just hope that if I write a custom module for a site, that someone
> > can't come knocking on my door, demanding my source code just because it
> > interacts with Drupal/MySQL and some other OS/GPL code base. My company
> > has been operating under the assumption that you can't.
> >
> >
> >   
> Under the current license there isn't a problem.  And from what I've
> heard here, and from Dries' post it looks like Drupal will *not* close
> the services loophole - so nothing will change for you (note that the
> FSF specifically attempts to support the older versions of the license
> and doesn't force an upgrade).
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