Dear Mr. Frey,

Your letter about our recent change to the GFDL, which lets operators of some GFDL-covered wiki sites relicense their contents under Creative Commons BY-SA license, raises the important questions of whether this change and the way we made it were proper, and what they imply in regard to trusting the FSF's stewardship of our licenses in the future.

In my judgment and that of the FSF board, this licensing change is fully consistent with our values, our ethics, and our commitments, and should demonstrate that the FSF continues to merit your trust. "Or any later version" licensing enables us to give new permissions that respond to the needs of the community, as well as defend against new threats to users' freedom.

The relicensing option in GFDL 1.3 is fully consistent with the spirit and purpose of the GFDL. It permits certain web sites to switch from the GFDL to another copyleft license, different in some details but similar overall. We did this to allow those sites to make their licenses compatible with other large collections of copylefted material that they want to cooperate with.

The impact of the change is limited because the relicensing option applies to a narrow range of cases: wiki sites such as Wikipedia containing material which does not use certain special features of the GFDL, invariant sections and cover texts, that don't translate into CC-BY-SA.

What we've done is give these wiki sites a time-limited opportunity to relicense to CC-BY-SA the materials that the public has contributed to them. The Wikimedia Foundation has begun a public discussion on whether to switch: Wikipedia contributors can argue for or against the change there. We have no role in that decision; our action was to give Wikipedia the chance to decide.

We did not make this change in haste. The FSF has been talking with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Software Freedom Law Center for a year to plan this change.

We held these discussions in private for a reason I hope you will approve of: to keep the option limited in applicability and avoid the possibility of wholesale relicensing of other GFDL-covered material. The relicensing option is meant for public collaboration wiki sites only. We did not want to let people relicense other GFDL-covered works by "laundering" them through Wikipedia and similar web sites before the cut-off date.

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

You described our license change as a "breach of trust", but if you look at what we have undertaken to do, you will see we have carried it out.

We have never asserted that we will not change our licenses, or that we will never make changes like this one. Rather, our commitment is that our changes to a license will stick to the spirit of that license, and will uphold the purposes for which we wrote it. That's what we did in with GFDL 1.3, and with the much larger changes in GPLv3, and that's what we'll continue to do.

You are right to call on the FSF to abide by the highest ethical standards. I hope you will come to agree that the GFDL license change demonstrates that we do.

Sincerely,
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation

Last week SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License B. The terms of this license are identical to the terms of the X11 License, with an optional notification clause added on for convenience. It is a free software license.

Previous versions of the SGI Free License B were nonfree. Luckily for us, however, they included this clause:

Once Covered Code has been published under a particular version of the License, Recipient may... choose to use such Covered Code under the terms of any subsequent version published by SGI.

So, now that SGI has released a new, free version of the license, users can take advantage of its terms. SGI has just made a large and invaluable contribution to free 3D software, and we're very thankful to them for that.

Unfortunately, today it still isn't be possible for free system distributions like gNewSense to add OpenGL support back to xorg just yet—there are still a few legal loose ends that need to be tied up first. But we're getting right to work on resolving those issues, and we're confident that we're going to be successful.

Here's the deal: all of the code that SGI contributed to Mesa is covered by the SGI Free License B, so that is all free software now. Most of the code that SGI contributed to xorg is available under this license too, but there are a few exceptions. A little bit of the code was released under the GLX Public License. That code can be found in these files:

• proto/glproto/glxint.h
• xserver/GL/glx/glxext.c
• xserver/hw/dmx/glxProxy/glxext.c

Since that code was originally contributed, two things have happened in parallel. First, developers outside of SGI have been changing it to better meet xorg's needs. Second, SGI later released their original code under the SGI Free License B.

Because it has been released under the SGI Free License B, the code in those files that comes directly from SGI is free software. However, we can't make the same assumption about the changes that other developers made—that code is still covered under the GLX Public License, and still nonfree. We need to get permission from those developers to release their contributions under a free license as well.

Right now, it looks like there have been somewhere between ten and twenty people who made changes to code released under the GLX Public License. We plan to work with them and the rest of the xorg team to get their contributions under an appropriate free software license. We hope that this process will take less than a month. And once it's done, a complete, modern OpenGL implementation will be available to the entire free software community.

Check back at this blog for progress updates as we get the rest of this sorted out and ensure freedom for 3D rendering.

Have you released some software under one of the new GNU licenses? If so, you might be interested in our license logos. We just published a couple for LGPLv3 and the GNU AGPL, in addition to the classic red GPLv3 logo.

You can use these logos on your project web page, or even in the software itself if you want. It's an easy and straightforward way to let your users know that the software they use and contribute to is protected by a license that puts software freedom first.

There's been a lot of news coverage recently about the lawsuits Busybox has filed against GPL violators. They're getting a lot of attention because analysts are interested in seeing if the GPL will be tested in a U.S. court. But that's not all the big news in the world of GPL enforcement: there's also a case in France over the Freebox that's starting up. The Freebox is a very popular cable box in France, so it's a high-profile case that's taking a lot of effort and coordination.

Because so much has happened so quickly, some people have speculated that developers' attitudes about GPL enforcement have changed. In reality, I don't think that's the case. To put it simply, filing lawsuits isn't fun. It takes a lot of time and energy that most people would rather spend elsewhere. These are all cases where the developers have tried hard to amicably work with the violators for compliance, and have been met with stonewalling and resistance. Compliance efforts around Freebox have been going on for years, to no avail.

One of the major goals of the GPL, and one of the main reasons so many software authors choose it, is to create a commons of software that everyone can share and build upon. All these developers would be satisfied just to see these companies follow the GPL's rules and contribute to that commons. Unfortunately, when a company fails to do that and won't respond to polite requests, legal action is the only major option left to address the problem. These lawsuits only demonstrate how serious we all are about protecting software freedom.

This is just a quick reminder for you all: tomorrow we'll be hosting an IRC meeting to talk about some of the FUD that's been thrown at GPLv3 lately, and answer your general questions about the license. Join us on freenode in #gplv3-meeting at 18:00 UTC, Wednesday, October 24. GPLv3 has been in the press a lot lately, so we'll have plenty to talk about.