GPLv3, Clarity and Simplicity

“The first I heard about plans for a GPLv3 revision was from
Bradley Kuhn early in 2005 at a meeting I organized for The Perl
Foundation (a public review of the Artistic License 2.0). My first
thought was ‘Great! We can finally clean up some of those
ambiguities in the GPL, and make it easier to understand and more
legally precise.’ These were my primary goals in driving the
Artistic 2.0 revision, so it’s understandable that I expected
something similar from the GPLv3. I don’t know that clarity and
simplicity was ever a goal that Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, or
any of the GPLv3 team desired to achieve. Looking at the
near-finished draft, I have to say it’s unlikely that they ever
considered simplicity a priority, if they considered it at all.

“I can’t fault them for failing to achieve a goal they never had
in the first place. But clarity and simplicity are important goals
for an open source license…”

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