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Originally written by software legend, Richard M. Stallman, the GPL sets out to provide a legal basis for establishing developers' rights to examine, copy, modify, reuse, share and redistribute software distributed under the licence. Over the years tens of thousands of software programs have been released under the GPL including many used throughout the world in large and small organisations, such as the Linux kernel, Samba and MySQL.

Although the current version 2 of the GPL has served the open source community well, the FSF feels a new licence needs to be introduced to cope with changes in technologies and the legal framework that surrounds it.

The EFF says that 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 and issues like compatibility with the upcoming Trusted Computing Platform and other Digital Rights

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Management issues which will appear over the coming years.

Among the possible extensions under discussion is a penalty clause saying that any company that uses patent law against free software loses the right to use that particular program, or to somehow penalise those companies that use DRM to enforce copyright. The FSF sees both software patents and DRM as fundamentally at odds with its own goals and aspirations.

Following the open source movement's success in fending off the introduction of software patents in Europe, the FSF is keen to make GPLv3 more international. 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 added, `We are working closely with our sister organisation and the SFLC to make sure GPLv3 will address the overarching and national European issues. 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.`

The FSF hopes to have a draft of the new licence ready for discussion by the Open Source community by the end of the year with GPLv3 in use some time in 2006.