14 DAY TRIAL // The well-known General Public Licence (GPL) is about to reach its third version, as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced this week. According to FSF officials the day GPL3 is scheduled to be released is this Friday, June 2007.
The license upgrading issue stirred many controversies in the open source community, dividing it in two camps: those who were pro a new GPL version and those, among whom Linus Torvalds, who considered that GPLv2 accomplishes its purpose just perfect.
After almost 16 years since the launch of GPLv2, the third version is said to bring up some improvements and according to Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer for FSF, GPL3 "is a copyright technology not found anywhere in the world with the goal of providing uniformity in different jurisdictions."
"There's a lot of copyright laws that talk about distribution, but they don't mean the same thing in different places. Now, GPL talks about propagation and conveying. With this new provision, the terms are the same everywhere worldwide ?" stated Smith.
One of the main differences between these two versions would be the explicit patent provision which forbids people who contribute to free software to sue users for patent infringement. According to Smith, this was not exactly very clear in the previous GPL version. GPL 3 also intends to be more compatible with other licenses too, such as the Apache license. The FSF has also released an essay where they've written about the benefits brought by this third version. According to Richard Stallman, the foundation's chairman, this license will also bring light in other more sensible areas, such as the controversial "tivoization".
"The reason to migrate is because of the existing problems which GPLv3 will fix, such as 'tivoization,' DRM, and threats from software patents. Further advantages of GPLv3 include better internationalization, gentler termination, support for BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache license," he said.