eWeek: GPL 3 to Take on IP, Patents

[ Thanks to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

"With a relatively hostile environment that has pitted proprietary software against open source as a backdrop, the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GNU General Public License, is working on the first revamp to the license in 13 years.

"The GPL, the most widely used free-software license, was created by FSF founder Richard Stallman, who last updated it in 1991. The changes planned for the next release, Version 3, a draft of which is due next year, focus on several broad topics that reflect the dynamic change in the software industry since the early 1990s—intellectual property licensing and patent issues, the question of how to deal with software used over a network, and concerns around trusted computing..."

Complete Story

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• The Age: FSF Raises Doubts Over Two Open Source Licences(Mar 04, 2004)
• FSF Announces Support of the Affero GPL, First Copyleft License for Web(Mar 19, 2002)