Announcing the GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project (GPLv3)
Stichting NLnet donate 150,000 EUR to support GPLv3 activities
The Free Software Foundations are proud to announce the creation of
the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project".
The project will bring together thousands of organisations, software
developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in
an effort to update the world's most popular Free Software licence. The
GPLv3 promises to be one of the largest participatory comments and
adoption efforts ever undertaken.
The sister organisations in the United States and Europe are also
happy to announce a total grant of 150,000 EUR from Stichting NLnet to
support this truly-unique project.
The global process will be overseen by the Free Software Foundation
with support from its legal counsel the Software Freedom Law Centre
(SFLC). Free Software Foundation Europe will be coordinating the
European activities closely with both organisations and contributing
to the global communication effort.
Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation says,
"With the release of GPLv3, we aim to increase the international reach
of the Free Software movement." To develop this new licence, we
will be contacting communities across the globe to ensure their
participation in the update of one of the most important social
documents of our time."
Georg Greve, President of FSF Europe adds, "We are working closely
with our sister organisation and the SFLC to make sure GPLv3 will
address the overarching and national European issues," and "Europe has
a vibrant ecosystem of highly-skilled Free Software developers and
small- and medium-sized Free Software enterprises. It will be our goal
to strengthen this development and help European governments to build
upon it."
In announcing the grant to the FSF and FSF Europe, Teus Hagen, chairman
of NLnet said, "NLnet's support of the GPL and the Free Software
movement, and its desire to see the successful adoption of GPLv3
achieved in the spirit of internationalization, made the funding of
this project an important priority for us." Hagen said, "We hope to
encourage other grant-making organisations to help fund this unique
project".
Written by Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and
Free Software Foundation, the GNU General Public Licence (``the GPL'')
is the Constitution and central licence of the Free Software movement,
securing users' rights to freely study, copy, modify, reuse, share and
redistribute software.
The GPL builds upon the ethical and scientific principle of free, open
and collaborative improvement of human knowledge, which was central to
the rapid evolution of areas like mathematics, physics, or biology,
and adapts it to the area of information technology.
By now, the GPL is employed by tens of thousands of software projects,
companies and governments around the world, and is supported by large
communities of software developers and users who wish to share their
work for the benefit of all.
The GNU system, the Linux kernel, Samba, MySQL, and many thousands of
other GPL'd programs, offer high technological quality as well as
political and economic independence and sustainability. GPL'd software
runs on or is embedded in devices ranging from mobile phones, PDAs and
home networking appliances to mainframes and supercomputing
clusters. Independent software developers around the world, as well as
every large corporate IT buyer and seller, and a surprisingly large
proportion of individual users, interact with the GPL.
The current version of the licence, which was written in 1991 and is
now 14 years old, has become central to the activities and operation
of a large part of all companies and governments and is now in need of
review.
Stichting NLnet, a non-profit foundation based in The Netherlands, has
a mission to stimulate network research and development in the domain
of Internet technology. It develops and releases software under the
GPL. http://www.nlnet.nl/
For details of the project, please refer to http://www.fsf.org or
contact info(a)fsf.org; European activities will also be presented at
http://fsfeurope.org, or via contact to team(a)fsfeurope.org.
About the Free Software Foundations:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), founded 2001, is a
charitable non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of
Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may
participate in a digital society. The the Freedoms to use, copy,
modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software
definition - allow equal participation in the information
age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software
politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting
development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE. Further
information about FSFE's work can be found at http://fsfeurope.org,
get active yourself at http://fsfeurope.org/contribute/.
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software - particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants - and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their Web site,
located at www.fsf.org, is an important source of information about
GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. Their headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Free Software Foundations currently exist in the United States,
Europe, India and Latin America. All FSFs form a network of sister
organisations.
--
Joachim Jakobs <jj(a)office.fsfeurope.org>
Media Relations - FSF Europe (http://fsfeurope.org)
fixed line: +49 700 - 373387673, Ext.: 4004
mobile: +49-179-6919565
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom! (http://www.fsfe.org)
1. Heading towards the GPLv3
2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy
3. AFFS General Meeting
4. Improving the infrastructure
1. Heading towards the GPLv3
The world wide network of Free Software Foundations is currently
preparing the next step in the evolution of the GNU General Public
License, the most used license in the Free Software world. While there
is no doubt that the current version (GPLv2) holds in court and is
applicable all over the world, the GPLv3 will address aspects that
were not as pressing or did not exist at the time the GPLv2 was
written, like programs that are used over the internet. Other issues
likely to be of interest are software patents, compatibility with
other copyleft licenses, DRM and TCP.
The Free Software Foundation Europe is determined to put as much time
and energy into this project as it needs to make the GPLv3 as powerful
and successful as the GPLv2 is.
The FSFE has set up a mailing list for public discussion of GPLv3, to
which you are invited to subscribe at
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/gplv3
2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy
Karsten Gerloff was asked to give a speech about the current
developments within the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
and the A2K (Access To Knowledge) Treaty at ATTAC Germany's summer
academy in Goettingen. His talk was part of a seminar on intellectual
monopoly rights.
Karsten was also invited to attend a meeting of the ATTAC "Knowledge
Commons" working group.
3. AFFS General Meeting
On 13 August, FSFE's UK based associate organisation AFFS held its
General Meeting. Ciaran O'Riordan held a talk about what has been
achieved with regards to software patentability, and how the road
ahead looks like.
4. Infrastructure
As August was a quite unspectacular and not many events were scheduled
this month, the FSFE team worked on what could be considered "house
keeping" -- improving the infrastructure so we will be ready for the
next work-intensive months.
A new asterisk server allowing Voice Over IP connections within the
team and the reorganisation of mail distribution lists and internal
data repositories should help improving communication, which is always
a challenge when people are spread all over Europe.
The Fellowship was another target of improvements: while the current
system works well and stable, the time has come for the first round of
improvements. A major point is the upcoming migration of the portal
site www.fsfe.org from Plone to ez Publish.
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html