The
Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released the fourth and
“last call” draft for version 3 of the
GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL).
The GNU GPL is the world's most widely used free software
licence, and is used to cover open source applications, including
Linux-based applications.
The Foundation is open for comments on the latest draft for 29
days, and expects to officially publish the licence on 29 June this
year.
The new draft incorporates feedback received from the general
public and official discussion committees since the release of the
previous draft on 28 March this year.
FSF executive director Peter Brown said, “We have made a few
very important improvements based on the comments we have heard,
most notably with licence compatibility.
“Now that the licence is almost finished, we can look forward to
distributing the GNU system under GPLv3, and making its additional
protections available to the whole community,” he said.
The Foundation says the new licence addresses areas such as
digital rights management and “threats from software patents”,
and delivers better internationalisation, support for
BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache licence.
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The Free Software Foundation:
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