Does Richard Stallman Consider GPLv3 a Success?

It has been nine months since the GNU GPL version 3 license was officially made public. Sure Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel developers have not (and aren’t likely to ever) adopt it. But there are other stats that I’ve written about from Palamida and Black Duck that imply that GPLv3 is on a solid track to broad adoption.

Samba, SugarCRM, OpenOffice and many many more are all on the GPLv3 bandwagon now.

So, with momentum apparently going the right way for the Free Software (or Open Source if you must) license, does the father of the Free Software Foundation and author of the original GPL consider the GPLv3 to be a success?

In an interview over on the Jupitermedia Datamation site (run by editor extraordinaire James Maguire ) Richard Stallman answers.

Q: Are you happy with the GPLv3 adoption to date? Is it proceeding as you hoped?
That question would
make sense if this were a business trying to be a success. But that’s
not what it is. GPLv3 is not something we did because we hoped it would
be a success, it’s something we did to do something about problems that
had arisen in the use of free software. Therefore, as long as some
important programs are still under GPLv2, we can’t protect their
freedom better.

Gotta love straight answers…