On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 08:01:36PM +0000, Andrew Katz wrote: >>> And I think that must be by RMS and Eben drafted the clause as they >>> did. > Richard Fontana wrote at 21:08 (EDT) on Thursday: >> Just to correct the historical record, RMS and Eben did not meet until >> several years after GPLv2 was drafted. ... GPLv2 was drafted with the >> help of a lawyer named Jerry Cohen[.] > > FWIW, just to add to this with another slight correction/addition to the > historical record on this point, I've seen and heard RMS publicly claim > in his post-GPLv3 speeches that he is *the* author of all versions of > the GPL, and that others involved were advisors, not co-authors.
The impression I got at the time was that there were multiple people working on drafting (i.e. writing parts of) the license: http://gplv3.fsf.org/original-process-definition --- The GPL revision comment process is a matter of information sharing. Below, in sections 3 and 4.1, we lay out ways that the community as a whole will tell version 3 drafters of issues with the current license...[the process is] designed so that...the drafters at FSF can directly address the community and present the reasoning behind changes. --- > RMS has also told me personally that during the GPLv3 process, he > considered lots of the proposals being offered to him, but vetted and/or > rewrote them himself before accepting them. Vetting and rewriting proffered content sounds more like the role of an editor than an author. > I have no reason to doubt RMS' claim of authorship and having exchanged > thousands of emails with RMS over the years, I attest that (IMO) GPLv2 > and GPLv3 are both unmistakably written in RMS' writing style. I thus > think we should give RMS credit for being both the inventor of copyleft > and author of GPLv1-3 (as well as the Emacs Public License, etc. ;). Based on my (albeit quite limited) understanding of the situation, I would be generally inclined to refer to RMS as the 'primary author' or 'chief architect' of GPLv3. Not that any such title should diminish his contributions to the process -- indeed, working collaboratively in the open can be much more challenging than laboring in private and alone! :-) Cheers, --R
