(When I heard this statement, I knew that the movement would successfully complete Stage One, roughly ten years later, and that the monopoly was doomed. Six weeks later, I put aside the history book I was writing—possibly forever—and began writing Anarchism Triumphant.)
Thus, the treatment of GPLv2 by development communities and industry parties invested the license revision decisions of the Free Software Foundation with enormous short-term force. And the movement could not responsibly exercise that power without giving everyone an opportunity to be heard and to participate.
I started designing in 2004 the structure of such a social process. Independent of the work on the substantive content of the license, we needed to understand the details of creating a deliberative mechanism that would accommodate hundreds of thousands of direct interactions with the text, and would create a productive and respectful environment for parties with very different cultural and social expectations.
Three primary substantive concerns motivated our revision of the GPL. At the top of the list was the need to respond to the movement’s success in transcending national borders: we needed a globally functional copyright license to replace the US-centric document Stallman and his lawyers had drafted and released in 1991. Second, we needed more aggressive measures to deal with the harmful consequences of the nightmare anti-commons created by the patent system. Third, we needed to prevent paracopyright law—like the US DMCA and the various national implementations of the EU Copyright Directive—from exercising any control over the development and distribution of free software.
Most copyrights industries, including proprietary software distributors, don’t make transnational retail license agreements: they act through local distributors licensing domestic intellectual property rights to local users under domestic law. Their licenses are tailored in expression and content to the domestic retail environment, based on the assumption that the licensees’ rights are limited to the transfer of the tangible form in which fixation has occurred.
But copyleft commons licenses like the GPL have at least a couple of moving parts, capable of being differently interpreted, effectuated, or interfered with by domestic legal rules. And any piece of free software may be copied and modified in multiple arbitrarily-determined jurisdictions before coming momentarily to rest in the locale of a dispute. Uniformity of operation is necessary to prevent the operational chaos that would ensue if the particular trajectory followed by a particular copy of software, existing in millions of identical copies on differing trajectories, somehow determined the legal rights of any party with respect to that particular copy.