GPL licence to be overhauled

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Law Centre have released the second discussion draft of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3).

This draft marks the middle of a year-long public review process designed to evaluate proposed changes and to finalise a new version of the GPL software licence.

The GPL's last revision was more than 15 years ago, but free software development, distribution and use have changed tremendously since that time.

Since the release of the initial GPLv3 discussion draft in January, members of the free software community have submitted nearly 1,000 suggestions for improvement.

"We have considered each suggestion with care," said Eben Moglen, founder and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Centre, which represents various free software projects and is assisting the FSF in revising the new licence.

"By listening to people from around the world, we are working toward a licence that acts consistently in many different legal systems and in a variety of situations."

Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF and original author of the GPL, added: "The primary purpose of the GNU GPL is to preserve users' freedom to use, share and modify free software. We depend on public review to make the GPL do this job reliably."

The new draft clarifies that the licence only directly restricts DRM in the special case in which it is used to prevent people from sharing or modifying GPLv3-covered software.

The clarified DRM section preserves the spirit of the original GPL which forbids adding additional 'unfree' restrictions to free software.

GPLv3 does not prohibit the implementation of DRM features, but prevents them from being imposed on users in a way that they cannot remove.

Other significant revisions in the new draft include a reworked licence compatibility section, and provisions that specifically allow GPL-covered programs to be distributed on certain file sharing networks such as BitTorrent.