stet and AGPLv3

Many people don't realize that the GPLv3 process actually began long before the November 2005 announcement. For me and a few others, the GPLv3 process started much earlier. Also, in my view, it didn't actually end until this week, the FSF released the AGPLv3. Today, I'm particularly proud that SFLC released the first software covered by the terms of that license.

The GPLv3 process focused on the idea of community, and a community is built from bringing together many individual experiences. I am grateful for all my personal experiences throughout this process. Indeed, I would guess that other GPL fans like myself remember, as I do, the first time the heard the phrase “GPLv3”. For me, it was a bit early — on Tuesday 8 January 2002 in a conference room at MIT. On that day, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen and I sat down to have an all-day meeting that included discussions regarding updating GPL. A key issue that we sought to address was (in those days) called the “Application Service Provider (ASP) problem” — now called “Software as a Service (SaaS)”.

A few weeks later, on the telephone with Eben one morning, as I stood in my kitchen making oatmeal, we discussed this problem. I pointed out the oft-forgotten section 2(c) of the GPL [version 2]. I argued that contrary to popular belief, it does have restrictions on some minor modifications. Namely, you have to maintain those print statements for copyright and warranty disclaimer information. It's reasonable, in other words, to restrict some minor modifications to defend freedom.

We also talked about that old Computer Science problem of having a program print its own source code. I proposed that maybe we needed a section 2(d) that required that if a program prints its own source to the user, that you can't remove that feature, and that the feature must always print the complete and corresponding source.

Within two months, Affero GPLv1 was published — an authorized fork of the GPL to test the idea. From then until AGPLv3, that “Affero clause” has had many changes, iterations and improvements, and I'm grateful for all the excellent feedback, input and improvements that have gone into it. The result, the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) released on Monday, is an excellent step forward for software freedom licensing. While the community process indicated that the preference was for the Affero clause to be part of a separate license, I'm nevertheless elated that the clause continues to live on and be part of the licensing infrastructure defending software freedom.

Other than coining the Affero clause, my other notable personal contribution to the GPLv3 was management of a software development project to create the online public commenting system. To do the programming, we contracted with Orion Montoya, who has extensive experience doing semantic markup of source texts from an academic perspective. Orion gave me my first introduction to the whole “Web 2.0” thing, and I was amazed how useful the result was; it helped the leaders of the process easily grok the public response. For example, the intensity highlighting — which shows the hot spots in the text that received the most comments — gives a very quick picture of sections that are really of concern to the public. In reviewing the drafts today, I was reminded that the big red area in section 1 about “encryption and authorization codes” is substantially changed and less intensely highlighted by draft 4. That quick-look gives a clear picture of how the community process operated to get a better license for everyone.

Orion, a Classics scholar as an undergrad, named the software stet for its original Latin definition: “let it stand as it is”. It was his hope that stet (the software) would help along the GPLv3 process so that our whole community, after filing comments on each successive draft, could look at the final draft and simply say: Stet!

Stet has a special place in software history, I believe, even if it's just a purely geeky one. It is the first software system in history to