Defender of the GPL

Eben Moglen's life just got a lot busier.

The Columbia Law School professor and attorney representing the Free Software Foundation has the new role of explaining and overseeing the update to the General Public License (GPL). That document, being revised for the first time in 15 years, is not only the embodiment of the free software movement's principles but also the legal foundation for thousands of open-source software programs from Linux to MySQL.

The draft of version 3 of the GPL doesn't change that fundamental mechanism, but it does take a more aggressive stance when it comes to patent law. Unlike 1991's version 2, the update explicitly tackles the issue of software patents. It also takes a stand against digital rights management technology--which the FSF dubs "digital restrictions management"--that encrypts or locks software or content to govern its use.

Moglen: Patents, unlike copyright, are said to control ideas rather than expressions. The soul of the free software movement is the re-implementation of neat stuff we thought up, no matter how we learned it or where we came by it; and in the world of copyright, there's nothing wrong with that. You can re-implement or redescribe or re-express anything you want however you please. When you write a newspaper story or a Web site story tomorrow, the question isn't: Are you reporting news somebody else owns? The question is: Did you write your own story? Imagine a world in which news was owned in such a way that once one guy reported it nobody else could report it for 20 years because the first guy to report it owned it. That's the problem that the patent law proposes to software.