[Committee-d] Draft 3 of GPLv3 Released

[Brett Smith]

On Sun, Apr 01, 2007 at 03:08:54PM -0400, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> Sure, ~22UTC on Sundays works for me in general and, I suppose, in this
> c ase in particular although that's more than a week away and I've got
> stuff to talk about already. We've got ~60 days to has this stuff out so
> if our first meeting is on the 9th, let's all ready the draft now and
> throw out issues we're going to bring up before.

I don't know if I'm in the committee per se, and I certainly don't want to
give you all orders or anything, but I definitely think this is a good
idea.

Now that we're trying to finalize the license, we're trying to open up and
take input from a lot more people.  The committee process hasn't worked the
way it was originally designed; rather than compiling and addressing
points on the comment system, most of them have come up with their own
issues to discuss.  I think that, on the whole, that's probably been a good
thing for us, but it has had some unfortunate side effects.  In particular,
it's even less clear that we're hearing from all the different
constituencies we want to hear from.

So we're trying to actively engage the whole community.  Hence, I'm
blogging about issues as they come up (http://fsf.org/blogs/licensing/),
and there's a FAQ about the draft, and a Q&A going on on Groklaw.  We're
thinking about more.  For example, I can't commit to this right now, but
we're thinking about hosting public IRC meetings about the draft, too.
(Logistics is the big thing holding us back there.)  We want everybody to
be up to speed and able to contribute meaningfully to the conversation so
we can feel confident that everything's been addressed.

I think I'm getting a little off-topic.  I think there's two points I want
to make.  First: I would encourage you all to worry less about formal
structure and more about just providing us with whatever feedback you feel
is appropriate.  IRC meetings with this committee have been very helpful in
hashing out particular issues quickly, but they have been hard to schedule.
As far as I'm concerned, discussion over the mailing list -- or any other
sort of collaboration, really -- is just as valuable as IRC meetings.  No
need to bottle everything up.

Second, if you have any ideas for how the FSF might be able to engage the
free software community and encourage more feedback, please let me know;
I'm all ears.  In particular, pretty soon we'll be looking to approach
major free software projects to check with them to see if they have any
particular feedback we might not have already heard, so if you have ins
with groups like that and could help find people to talk to, that'd be
especially helpful.

If there are any questions or concrens about any of this, please don't
hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,

-- 
Brett Smith
Licensing Compliance Engineer, Free Software Foundation