First Draft of GPL Version 3 Released

njan writes "The first draft of version three of the GNU General Public License was released to the public this afternoon. Major improvements touted in version three include changes designed to mitigate the damage posed by new threats to free software such as software patents. One individual stated about the release: 'It is changes in law, not computer technology, that pose the principal challenges to the free software community. Chief among these changes has been the unwise and ill-considered application of patent law to software. Software patents threaten every free software project, just as they threaten proprietary software and custom software. Any program can be destroyed or crippled by a software patent belonging to someone who has no other connection to the program.'"

Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

I have patented the contents of the article. No one may read it without paying me first.

Argh, bad text layout...

[Al Dimond]

Gah... why couldn't there be a web page that didn't have BR tags at the 80-character mark every time. This is like reading e-mail in the 90s! (Actually this looks like a plone-based site so it's probably serving up auto-generated *ml from a text file... which is no excuse, really. If vim can fix up stuff like that then plone could too.)

Re:it's difficult to read.

[Anonymous Coward]

why is it so difficult to read?

I don't know but I see that you also find it difficult to start sentences with a capital letter. That's our first clue.

Does anyone have any screenshots?

[stonedyak]

I can't wait to try it out! But are there any binaries to download? I can only seem to find the source code [fsf.org], and I don't have a compiler for Lawyer++.

Re:I'll stick with the MIT license.

[RibRdb]

If people don't want their code used in any situation, perhaps they should consider the Death and Repudiation License.
http://search.cpan.org/src/AUTRIJUS/YAML-Syck-0.04 /COPYING [cpan.org]

Re:I'll stick with the MIT license.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, Netcraft confirms BSD is dead. It certainly killed them off.

Re:FULL TEXT

[HeroreV]

<script type="text/javascript">
  if( article.textContent.length > 3*librariesOfCongress )
  {
    var myPost = document.getPostByUser('herorev');
    myPost.appendChild( document.createTextNode('too long...') );
  }
</script>

too long...

just to elaborate on that point

[penguin-collective]

It's too bad that you have to understand any kind of legaleese to be a programmer, but that's life.

I think programmers aren't the ones to complain about obscure notation and languages, given that we have invented many more of them than lawyers ever have in the history of the world.

Re:Other issues

[sp3tt]

" What both of you are saying is what I wrote in the first place!"

Sue them for copyright infringement.