Developers Bill of Rights - What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License

Coverage of the debate on the new version of the GNU Public License (GPLv3) has focused on the differing opinions among three groups: Project leaders like Linus Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers; Foundations like the Free Software Foundation (FSF) led by Richard Stallman; and Large Technology Companies such as Sun, HP, IBM, and Novell. While these three groups are certainly all affected by revisions to the GPL, open source developers are also affected, but have been significantly under-represented in the discussion.

In this paper, our objective was to give developers a voice and bring their opinions into the debate. What does this fourth constituency think about open source licenses, the upcoming release of the GPLv3, and the philosophies surrounding open source software?

To answer this question, our research explored developers’ opinions through interviews. The interviews targeted influential developers who are working on or had worked on a variety of open source projects including JBoss, Apache, Linux Kernel and related tools, MySQL, Apache Geronimo, Snort, Zmanada, XenSource, PostgreSQL and others.