HP had objected to a provision that said any party that distributes GPL software agrees not to sue recipients for infringement of patents involved with the software. The new draft is more moderate, however. In it, a party agrees only to sue for patents related to software it contributes to an open-source project, not for software it distributes without modification.
Barriers to code sharing
Sun Microsystems picked the GPL to govern its Java software and OpenSparc processor design and is considering the GPL for its OpenSolaris operating system.
But there's one thing that Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, would still like to see in the new draft: more compatibility between different open-source licenses.
"The wider free and open-source community has really got to do something about license compatibility," Phipps said. "We've got lots of software (projects) around that (are) free software, yet we can't mix them. It's like friendly-fire casualties. We need to do something about that, but it seems clear that GPL 3 is not going to be the vehicle by which we do that."
Sun is considering GPL 3 for Solaris, but the Linux kernel is governed by GPL 2, and license incompatibilities could keep the two projects separate. In Phipps' opinion, though, that particular divide is technical, not legal.
"The main reason why we're not seeing intermingling is because the two are designed in radically different ways that makes intermingling impossible," Phipps said.
The issue also crops up in Java. Sun chose GPL for that project, but much open-source Java work -- including the Apache Harmony project to reproduce the Java's core components -- is under the Apache License. The Free Software Foundation had hoped for Apache License compatibility, but said that patent provisions got in the way.
"We regret that we will not achieve compatibility of the Apache License, version 2.0, with GPL 3, despite what we had previously promised," the foundation said in its GPL 3 draft explanation.
It's inevitable that not everybody will be happy with the new GPL, but there's still room for more adjustment. A penultimate "last-call" draft is due in 60 days, and the final version 30 days after that -- June 26.
The changes in the new draft released on Wednesday show the foundation is willing to budge, Radcliffe said. "It shows the FSF has been listening to the various constituents and has been responding."
CNET News.com's Candace Lombardi contributed to this report.
