Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 27th Mar 2007 13:00 UTC
The third discussion draft of GPL version 3 is scheduled for release at 7 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, Brett Smith, a licensing compliance engineer for the Free Software Foundation said in a mailing list posting Monday. The current GPL 2 governs the rights and restrictions of many open-source and free-software projects, including high-profile ones such as the Linux kernel, Java and MySQL database. A 'last-call' draft is due 60 days after the third discussion draft, and the final GPL 3 will arrive 30 days after that, Smith said.
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Member since:
2005-10-02
Dooh...
Patents again... have you read GPL v. 2?. GPL v.2 already _has_ a patent retaliation. It is just implicit rather than explicit, but none the less equally valid in court.
The DRM-part is right though - to some extent. GPL v. 3 does not prohibit DRM in GPL'ed applications. It only "prohibits" the effect of using DRM (efficiently making DRM useless with GPL v. 3).
The DRM-part is controversial but none the less FSF has no choice if it wants to protect the four freedoms. Hardware DRM violates the four freedoms and therefore the spirit of GPL v. 2 - as stated in the preamble for GPL v. 2. Personally I don't care much in relation to Linux since I consider LGPL a better license for a kernel than GPL.
The "anti-Novell" provisions are necessary as well in order to protect the four freedoms. You can say that Microsoft through the deal with Novell forces the hands of FSF - or put another way. Through FSF' reactive behaviour Microsoft has the upper hand in the battle between proprietary and FLOSS.