With this entry, guest blogger Bernard Golden begins his series of commentaries on the ongoing revision process for the General Public License.

Open source has brought a new set of rules to the table of which every IT shop needs to be aware. First and foremost are the licenses under which open source software is distributed – and this is a topic you’ll hear a lot about in 2006 as the most common open source license – the General Public License (GPL) – releases a draft of its third version.

Why are open source licenses such a big deal? They enforce all the benefits of open source: freedom to use the software as you see fit, ability to modify the product via the included source code, and right to redistribute the modified code.

The most widely used open source license is the GPL. In addition to the usual open source license conditions, the GPL also requires users to redistribute any modified code under the same GPL conditions. In other words, if you tweak a GPL-based product and distribute your modifications, you must offer your users the same rights to your software as you had for the original product.

Depending upon how you use GPL-based open source, this condition can be either trivial or monumental. If you modify GPL code, but never redistribute (for instance, you’re an IT organization that uses the product solely internally), this condition makes no difference to you. If you’re a packaged software vendor, however, and you distribute GPL-based code, you run the risk of having to distribute your entire source base to the world. For this reason, GPL is often referred to as a "viral license," since it can “infect” proprietary source code and turn it into open source code.

Now the Free Software Foundation, promulgator of the GPL, is about to release a draft of GPL 3. I predict a tremendous amount of discussion and controversy over the next year as the FSF moves through the draft process. Why? Because while the FSF claims modest goals for the update, it is also rumored to be considering a couple of changes to the GPL that could severely impact the IT industry.

First is the possibility that the GPL will be modified to make it easier for GPL and other open source-licensed code to coexist in a single piece of software. Today, language in the GPL overrides other licenses. That means that Berkeley license-based software that integrates some GPL-based code could get converted automatically (and perhaps unintentionally) to GPL. If the GPL changes to better support mix-and-match licenses, that is all to the good.