As You may have heard, there is currently a rather intense debate going on about the proposed new version 3 of the GNU General Public License (the GPL).
Hobbit uses the GPL license - and specifically, it uses the current version 2. A change to version 3 of the GPL therefore cannot happen automatically - it has to be a deliberate decision by me (and anyone else who has contributed code to Hobbit) to do so.
The proposed GPL v3 adds some rather troubling restrictions to the license, especially when it comes to using GPL-licensed code in systems that include various DRM (Digital Rights Management) mechanisms. It also poses some legal challenges to companies that obtain patents on their work, which could very well mean that they would not be able to use GPLv3 licensed software at all.
I fundamentally believe that DRM and patents - especially patents on computer software - is evil, and I would never buy anything that comes with such restrictions on what I can use it for.
However, the GPL v3 proposal is too much of a "fight fire with fire" agenda for me. Whether our society should permit patents is a political discussion, not a software-development issue. So it should be handled politically, not in a software license. DRM restrictions can be dealt with simply through normal market mechanisms - if you dislike them, dont buy products that have them. Or make something that is better and release it in an Open Source way.
I am not a lawyer, so I may have misunderstood quite what the proposed changes mean - but if I have, then several other software developers whose judgment I respect have also misunderstood them. Most notably, a large collection of the Linux kernel developers - including Linus Torvalds - strongly oppose the GPL v3 changes and have recently published a discussion document detailing why they believe these changes are wrong. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/448894 When the second draft of GPLv3 was published, Linus also participated in a lengthy discussion explaining his views on the Groklaw blog. If you're interested, see the (long) "DRM misunderstood" thread starting at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060727140038810 and especially http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20060727140038810&title=...
All that just to explain my position: As far as I am concerned there will not be a change of license for Hobbit, at least not with the current wording of the GPLv3.
Just in case anyone cared.
Regards, Henrik