If you're using Linux you've probably heard that the GPL license is up for revisement. At least the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman wants a new version 3. This has caused considerably disturbance in the Open Source community, especially since Linus Torvalds announcd that he's going to stick with the current license, v2, for his kernel. Despite this, FSF & RS pushes forward and the proposal for GPL 3 is now in its final drafts before release.
This post, however, is not intended to fuel the license quarrels any further. A total confrontation is imminent anyway and the two sides seems to be divided by an abyss of disagreement. So the situation is not likely to solve itself soon. It may very well be the beginning of the end of RS and FSF as an influental force, but what's bothering me is that it may also be the beginning of the end to glibc.
Because one thing will soon become an important practical issue for us all to consider: As you may know, FSF and RS owns GNU and glibc, which is the foundation of what most of the routines in GNU/Linux is built upon - except the kernel, of course. Now, if we look forward to the probable situation that GNU and glibc is updated to GPL 3, while the kernel stays with v2, we have a full split, because we're forced to freeze of fork the v2 GNU framework until we can replace it with something else!
What will happen to many of the glibc programs? Many will probably dissapear in the conversion/replacement process. Perhaps this will be KDE's golden opportunity to prevail? If Gnome is freezed - for a time - and KDE 4 is a success, there's nothing to stop KDE from being the preferred desktop for the OS community.
This is share speculations of course. We'll see what really happens. But the OS community may just face its worst crisis so far.
