We are learning how. From 2005 to 2007, I directed the drafting and negotiation leading to the promulgation of the third version of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used license for free software. Five orders of magnitude of economic growth and two of demographic expansion having occurred in the relevant communities over the life of GPLv2, it’s not surprising that the third version became a worldwide negotiating effort involving thousands of parties, discussing the fate of $10s billions and simultaneously debating issues of moral principle.
It was evident, however, that we could not achieve the substantive goals of the license revision—which I’ll discuss in a moment—without a public participatory process, in which it would be necessary to give equal weight and dignity to the needs of small development projects run outside the cash nexus, and the positions of the largest IT vendors and users in the global economy. The design of that process constitutes the anarchist methodology under current technological conditions for the formation and deployment of massively multilateral relational transnational contracts—the frontier of transnational legal institutions.
Why would hundreds of thousands of people around the world care what RMS and I thought about the third version of the GPL? After all, their communities were held together by the GPL’s second version, and nobody could force them to change their license terms midlife: they had their own copyrights and could license them however they pleased.
But it’s not that simple. Or rather, it is just as simple, but it is different. The GNU General Public License designs a unique form of commons, and it includes provision to change the rules with near-retroactive effect.
Because GPL was designed from the first as a constitution for communities as well as a license for the distribution of copyrighted works, it assumed a need for flexibility over time-scales longer than decades, and met the need with GPLv2 § 9:
The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.