As the published record of the proceedings shows, the eighteen months spent making GPLv3 in public—from the announcement of the first discussion draft on January 18, 2006 to the final publication on June 27, 2007—was the largest transnational drafting exercise so far. Thousands of substantive online comments, hundreds of hours of conference calls and face to face deliberations among industry lawyers, public conferences on every continent, with every comment linked to a resolution. Every participating party—from IBM, HP, NEC, Nokia, Siemens to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, two Directorates of the European Commission, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, and Free World parties such as Samba Team, Apache, Perl Foundation, and individual hackers—were given equal opportunity to participate in fora designed and administered by anarchism for everyone’s maximum convenience.
The result is a success which has also vindicated the decisionmaker: adoptions of GPLv3 have overwhelmingly been for “GPLv3 and any later version,” or “GPL,” rather than “GPLv3 only,” thus in effect renewing the Free Software Foundation’s power to revise the license.
No private market participant and no governmental public organization has yet gone as far as the anarchist sector in the new forms of transnational contract formation; each has fewer reasons for pressing the limits of legal engineering in the networked society, which is the only environment in which anarchism possesses decisive long-term superiority. But they will soon be following in the movement’s footsteps.
For comparative purposes, to refine our observations, it seems useful to consider one additional example of transnational legislation in a closely-related area: standards for digital “office suite” file formats.
There are real technical and human interface engineering reasons to think that the way “office suite” programs work fundamentally impedes social productivity immensely. Microsoft, as an entity with black ink on the bottom line despite its immense costs, can only exist because of two monopoly rent streams: the operating system monopoly on “application program interfaces” identified in US v. Microsoft and now destroyed by free software and the failure of Vista, and the monopoly on Office secured by file format incompatibility.