LICENCE TO BILL

Jonni Bidwell has been reading licence minutiae and fears big business threatens the future of copyleft and software freedom.

- Jonni Bidwell

When Richard Stallman wrote the first version of the GPL, even if no one but people contributing to the GNU Project were using it, it represented a major shake-up of traditional licensing practices. Besides defining the oft-quoted ‘four freedoms’ (numbered 0 to 3, of course), it turned traditional copyright – that is, a list of things you cannot do with a particular work – completely on its head.

Code under GPL was free (as in speech), in the sense that anyone could see and modify it. The only real proviso was that the resulting code had to be subject to those same GPL provisions. Free begets free. That said, the GPL in no way restricts one’s ability to sell software and, optionally, distribute the paid version under a separate licence.

When Oracle was on the brink of acquiring Sun Microsystems in 2009, there was concern that Sun’s MySQL database – one of the most successful GPL efforts in history, and one it had acquired the year previous – would effectively become a proprietary product, since any fork of the free work would have to be GPL-licensed. It could not be commercially licensed by anyone other than Oracle, since it – being a company that had a history of making money from databases – inherited the licence. As it happened, this change saw MySQL founder Monty Widenius release the free MariaDB fork just before the acquisition was approved. Thanks to its compatibility with MySQL, MariaDB is today doing rather well.