GPLv3

I had a read over the draft GPLv3 earlier today and was very happy to find that it will include explicit language surrounding patent licenses.

GPL/EPL incompatibility on this point has been a major source of headaches for me. On several occasions, I’ve wanted to do something cool with Eclipse but got shot down because of license incompatibility with the GPL. Or maybe worse yet, one has had to develop hacky inter-process communication methods to prevent in-process mingling of GPL and EPL bits. Even though the question of whether or not linking code with incompatible licenses actually violates licensing terms seems to lead to a grey area, I’ve seen that most err on the side of caution and just assume that it shouldn’t be done. Now I’ll be able to link GPL’ed and EPL’ed code without fear! I love it.

This news also hits even closer to home. I’ve been investigating the possibility of integrating previous work on Eclipse-OProfile into the Eclipse TPTP framework, and doing this easily would probably require me to link GPL and EPL code.

I remember when Eben Moglen spoke at the UofT KMDI event back in 2004, he mentioned the possibility of revisiting the question of an explicit, royalty-free patent license in the next version of the GPL. And now we have it!