GPL 3: Coming Saturday?
GPL 3 proponent Bruce Perens told reporters Monday that he would bet that new license will be disclosed at this meeting, although he said he did not know for certain.
Perens hosted a press event to coincide with Novell's Brainshare 2007 kickoff in Salt Lake City.
Some in the open-source world have blasted Novell for its new-found allegiance with Microsoft, which they view as anathema to the open source movement.
Perens also confirmed what has long been rumored -- that the GPL 3 will include provisions that could work to the detriment of Novell as a result of that Microsoft pact.
He later forwarded this statement from FSF's Richard Stallman: [Note: my emphasis added.]
In his press briefing, Perens said any code now covered by the GPL 2 would continue to be covered under that license, Perens said. Novell's problem would come because core code emanating from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), including the libc, glibc libraries and c compilers will move to GPL 3 and at that point Novell would not be able to use them unless it complied with the new license.
"What happens then is a fork. Novell gets stuck with old technology and the gap will get wider," Perens said.
Trying to summarize what the GPL would say re. Novell, one Linux reporter put it this way: "Hey, Novell! [insert raspberry sound here.]"
Just minutes earlier, across the street, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, said he could not comment on the new general public license.
"The GPL 3 is a work in progress so it's inappropriate for me to speculate what would happen there. But given the high sensitivity of the community, it is important to us how the community feels. Novell is very committed to Linux and Linux is a key part of our strategy," he said.
This report was updated Monday afternoon with Stallman's statement.