Jonni Bidwell has been reading licence minutiae and fears big business threatens the future of copyleft and software freedom.

W hen Richard Stallman wrote the first version of the GPL, even if no one but people contributing to the GNU Project were using it, it represented a major shake-up of traditional licensing practices. Besides defining the oftquoted ‘four freedoms’ (numbered 0 to 3, of course), it turned traditional copyright – that is, a list of things you cannot do with a particular work – completely on its head.

Code under GPL was free (as in speech), in the sense that anyone could see and modify it. The only real proviso was that the resulting code had to be subject to those same GPL provisions. Free begets free. That said, the GPL in no way restricts one’s ability to sell software and, optionally, distribute the paid version under a separate licence.

When Oracle was on the brink of acquiring Sun Microsystems in 2009, there was concern that Sun’s MySQL database – one of the most successful GPL efforts in history, and one it had acquired the year previous – would effectively become a proprietary product, since any fork of the free work would have to be GPL-licensed. It could not be commercially licensed by anyone other than Oracle, since it – being a company that had a history of making money from databases – inherited the licence. As it happened, this change saw MySQL founder Monty Widenius release the free MariaDB fork just before the acquisition was approved. Thanks to its compatibility with MySQL, MariaDB is today doing rather well.

But free software’s uneasy relationship with industry continues to evolve. In 2018 MongoDB introduced the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and switched its database of the same name’s licence to it from AGPLv3. The stated goal here was to stop unscrupulous cloud vendors using MongoDB in their own cloud applications, but pundits were sceptical. To worsen matters the SSPL was later adopted by Elastic Inc. for its immensely popular ElasticSearch and Kibana products.

H ere’s a funny thing. We review a bunch of distros every month. And each review has an about box, and each about box has a ‘licence’ category. Yet, with very few exceptions, it’s impossible to say which licence a whole distro falls under. Superfluous page furniture aside, this raises some important questions.

The Linux Kernel has been a GPLv2-licensed affair since very soon after its release. Indeed, it is said that that shift from Linus’s original non-commercial licence to a copyleft one directly contributed to Linux’s early success. That kernel appears in every Linux distro alongside all kinds of other software. Most Linux distros incorporate GPL-licensed tooling from the GNU project, whence comes the coverline-unfriendly GNU/Linux conjunction. And if that were all they included then licensing would be straightforward. Such a distro would very much be ripe GPL fare.