Welcome to FSFE's GPLv3 project page. Our goals are to raise awareness of the proposed licence changes, to help people to participate in the public consultation, and to constantly document the current state of the discussion so that members of the community can enter the discussion knowing the current state.
Much of FSFE's GPLv3 work is made possible by the Fellowship of FSFE. To support the this work, consider joining the Fellowship and encouraging others to do so. You can also support FSFE by making a donation.
The first public discussion draft of GPLv3 was published on January 16th 2006 on the gplv3.fsf.org web portal. On the same day, an approximately year-long public consultation process began. This occurred during the first international GPLv3 conference.
On July 27th, the second draft was published, responding to six months of public comments. You can see the changes from draft 1 to draft 2, or the changes from GPL version 2 to draft 2 of GPLv3.
A third draft is expected in late December or early January.
The official version three of the GNU GPL is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2007.
Version 2 of the GNU GPL - the current official (non-draft) version - was published in 1991. The purpose of the GPL is to ensure that everyone who receives a copy of GPL-licensed software is free to use that software, to modify it, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.
Today it is by far the most used licence for Free Software. The number of people who use software which is distributed under the terms of the GPL is somewhere in the region of 100s of millions.
Version 3 will do the same job as version 2 but will be updated to account for changes in software's legal and technical environment, and to thwart new techniques devised in the past fifteen years to take the above freedoms away from software users.
The public consultation is being managed by our sister organisation at the official GPLv3 website. There you can:
By signing up, you will also be added to an announcement mailing list and will receive infrequent notifications of key GPLv3 events.
For a list of past and future GPLv3 events, see the Events page on the GPLv3 wiki.