The first discussion draft of the new license – known as GPLv3 –
will be released at a public conference, due to be held at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 16th and 17th January.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will then coordinate a
structured process of eliciting feedback from the community, with
the goal of producing a final licence that best defends freedom and
serves community and business. The process will include public
discussion, identification of issues, considerations of those
issues, and the publication of responses.
Publication of the second discussion draft is expected by summer
2006 and a last call, or final discussion draft, will be produced
in the autumn of 2006. The final licence is expected no later than
spring 2007.
Free software community projects, Global 2000 companies and
individual developers, as well as non-governmental organisations,
government agencies, small businesses and individual users will be
invited to participate in the revising process of GPLv3.
Individual comments will be reviewed and addressed primarily
through committees to be set up at the MIT conference.
Additionally, individual comments can be submitted on the GPL
website or during one of the many public meetings being held
internationally.
"The guiding principle for developing the GPL is to defend the
freedom of all users," said Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, a
US non-profit group dedicated to the promotion of free
software.
"As we address the issues raised by the community, we will do so
in terms of the four basic freedoms software users are entitled to
– to study, copy, modify and redistribute the software they use,”
he said. “GPLv3 will be designed to protect those freedoms under
current technical and social conditions and will address new forms
of use and current global requirements for commercial and
non-commercial users."
Background
The GPL is a licence commonly used for many free software
projects, including the Linux operating system kernel. The GPL
licences software free of cost but requires any re-distributor to
provide the full source code and a copy of the full licence
text.
It was written by Stallman, who also founded the GNU Project –
which developed a free UNIX-like operating system called GNU.
Stallman's site explains that GNU, pronounced "guh-noo," is a
recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."
Variants of the GNU operating system which use the Linux kernel
are now widely used. These systems are usually referred to as Linux
systems; but Stallman points out that they are more accurately
called GNU/Linux systems.
The current version of the GPL is now 15 years old and, while it
has become central to the activities and operation of a large
number of companies and governments around the world, it needs
updating.
The FSF has therefore started a project to bring together
organisations, software developers and software users from around
the world, over the course of 2006, to update the licence in as
consensual a way as possible.
The process will be overseen by the FSF, supported by its legal
counsel, the Software Freedom Law Centre. European activities will
be coordinated by the FSFE.
