On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 04:49:34PM -0400, Robinson Tryon wrote: > The impression I got at the time was that there were multiple people > working on drafting (i.e. writing parts of) the [GPLv3] license: > > http://gplv3.fsf.org/original-process-definition
This document was released a couple of months before the public phase of the GPLv3 drafting process started, so it has a certain aspirational quality to it. > --- > 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. > --- Based on remarks by Eben Moglen given at a panel discussion at OSBC East 2005 which I attended (shortly before I was hired and joined SFLC), I believe the FSF at this time thought that the GPLv3 drafts would elicit tens (hundreds?) of thousands of community commentary about the license. I'm afraid that is not what happened, though the degree of public commentary received was unprecedented for a software license. There were more like a thousand or so comments on the draft, and the FSF and its counsel made a good effort to respond to them, and some of them had a material influence over the draft. The FSF also formed a set of four (or, according to some more dubious versions of the history, five) committees (loosely representative of free software interest groups) to nominally aid in the drafting process. These committees, two of them in particular which were dominated by vendor and commercial end-user lawyers, did have a notable degree of influence over a few significant parts of the draft at the level of legal critique and, to a lesser degree, policy.[1] However, for the most part they were not responsible for *authoring* anything, the way I would understand 'author'. I can point to a few sentences here and there that originated textually with some members of these committees, but this was not typical. In any case, this is not inconsistent with Bradley's statement. GPLv3 was never envisioned as a license that would be collectively authored by hundreds, let alone tens of thousands, of people, and it wasn't. Indeed I sometimes hear people say that GPLv3 suffers from having the appearance of having been 'drafted by committee' (as though it were like certain standards specs) but that isn't accurate either. > > 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. RMS's role was certainly more than that of a mere editor, I can assure you. As I noted, he certainly saw himself as 'final author'. But I don't quite agree with the impression Bradley's remarks give. RMS did delegate much of the actual drafting -- after late 2005 that is -- to SFLC, specifically Eben and me. But he was ultimately responsible for all basic matters of policy reflected in the current text, that is for certain. Nothing we wrote ended up in the license without his approval, and this involved discussion and debate and rewording by RMS in many cases. > 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! :-) I'm sure it is historically accurate to say that GPLv3 was much more of a collective effort than earlier versions of the GPL (though I believe the FSF attempted to gather and incorporate community feedback into GPLv1 and GPLv2). I have to also say that it is a myth that GPLv3 was developed 'collaboratively in the open' -- though it may have approximated this more than any predecessor free software license. The most productive period of drafting involved the period between July 2007 and March 2007 when the FSF was largely silent with respect to the general public regarding the status of the draft. - Richard [1] It is interesting to look back on the reasons those lawyers got involved at all, because it may seem so bizarre today. Bradley put it well in an episode of Free as in Freedom: paraphrasing, lots of commercial lawyers were under a naive 'mass delusion' (I think that's the phrase Bradley used) that the entire free software ecosystem would be migrating to GPLv3, making the commercial stakes extraordinarily high -- right around the zenith of what some now call the 'open source bubble' of the mid-2000s.
