We are forwarding this announcement by Hempal Shrestha of Asia Commons, announcing the launch of GNU GPL Version 3:

“Great news, after Creative Commons 3.0, now we have GNU GPL Version 3 and GNU LGPL Version 3. As Richard Stallman, founder and president of the FSF said “GNU GPL is to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program” and “A lot of time and effort went into this license. Now free programs must adopt it so as to offer their users its stronger protection for their freedom,”

This has been after a long and unprecedented drafting process that has seen four published drafts in eighteen months. And discussions based on these drafts that included thousands of comments from the public that the GNU GPL Version 3 and GNU LGPL Version 3 was finally released on June 29 by Free Software Foundation (FSF: http://www.fsf.org). As the Foundation’s executive director, Peter Brown said “By hearing from so many different groups in a public drafting process, we have been able to write a license that successfully addresses a broad spectrum of concerns. But even more importantly, these different groups have had an opportunity to find common ground on important issues facing the free software community today, such as patents, tivoization, and Treacherous Computing,”. According to Jeremy Allison the new license is a great improvement on the older GPL, and that it is a necessary update to deal with the new threats to free software that have emerged since version 2 of the GPL.” (Source: http://www.fsf.org/news/gplv3_launched).

There are many Licenses which are well-suited under Free and Open Source Software, but GNU GPL and GNU LGPL acquire special status in the Free and Open Source Software community. By some measures, the GPL has become the single most popular license for free and open source software. As of January 2006, the GPL accounted for nearly 66% of the 41,962 free software projects listed on Freshmeat, and as of January 2006, about 68% of the projects listed on SourceForge.net. Similarly, a 2001 survey of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that 50% of the source code was licensed under the GPL and a 1997 survey of MetaLab, then the largest free-software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the licenses used. One survey of a large repository of open-source software reported that in July 1997, about half the software packages with explicit license terms used the GPL. Prominent free software programs licensed under the GPL include the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Some other free software programs are dual-licensed under multiple licenses, often with one of the licenses being the GPL. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GPL)

The first GNU GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989 for use with programs released as part of the GNU project. The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991. Over the following 15 years, some members of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community came to believe that some software and hardware vendors were finding loopholes in the GPL, allowing GPL-licensed software to be exploited in ways that were contrary to the intentions of the programmers. These concerns included tivoization (the inclusion of GPL-licensed software in hardware that will refuse to run modified versions of it); the use of closed-source, modified versions of GPL software behind web interfaces; and patent deals between Microsoft and Linux and Unix distributors that may represent an attempt to use patents as a weapon against competition from the GNU/Linux system. Now GNU GPL Version 3 has been developed to attempt to address these concerns. The GPL version 3 does not restrict the features of a program; in particular, it does not prohibit Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) . However, it prohibits the use of tivoization and Treacherous Computing to stop users from changing the software. Thus, they are free to remove whatever features they may dislike.(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GPL)

The AGPLv3, FDLv2, and SFDL are still being revised and FSF is looking forward for feedback and support to develop these licenses.

For further information and reference visit:

1. http://gplv3.fsf.org/
2. http://www.fsf.org/news/gplv3_launched
3. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
4. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html
5. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GPL