FSF Releases Third Draft of GPLv3

johnsu01 writes "The Free Software Foundation has announced publication of the third discussion draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3. Because quite a few changes have been made since the previous draft and important new issues have surfaced, the drafting process has been extended and revised to encourage more feedback. The most significant changes in this draft include refinements in the "tivoization" provisions to eliminate unwanted side effects, revision of the patent provisions to prevent end-runs around the license, and further steps toward compatibility with other free software licenses. The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal."

Comments

Can they do that?

[venicebeach]

The FSF has also explicitly asked the community whether the new patent provisions should apply retroactively to the Microsoft-Novell deal

Is that really an option? Wouldn't that be changing the terms of the license (v2) after it was distributed and agreed to? I don't understand how they can affect the Novell deal without going through the trouble of upgrading Linux to GPLv3-- and even then Novell should be able to use old Linux released under GPLv2, no?

Adoption?

[Bruce Perens]

I don't think they have to worry about adoption. They have all of the FSF-owned software going to GPL3, which means that you can't really make a distribution without accepting GPL3. And most likely things like Samba, MySQL, Solaris and other Sun offerings, essentially anything owned by people who don't want the trick that Novell and Microsoft pulled to apply to them. I think that will be a lot of people. In the end, it might even be the kernel team. But that will take 1 to 2 years to play out.

Bruce