GPLv3 was launched on Friday (29) after close to eighteen months of public involvement in it’s drafting process. This has been an important milestone in the free software world as an upgrade to the GPL to address some of the more modern concerns have been a long time coming. I think Bruce Perens sums this up well when he said:

“When the GPLv2 and GPLv1 were written, we got music from phonograph records,” he says. “The most complicated input device people had in their homes was a touch-tone telephone. The only thing that was even close to digital rights management were these dongles you’d hang on the back of your computer that would authorize you to run software — digital rights management didn’t even really exist.”

You can read the rest of the Wired article — here.

I was at the Free Software Foundation with a couple of my mates and you can find some of the photographs, here. RMS made the announcement in a room rigged with audio equipment, so everyone was really quiet. In a room where the dropping of a pin could be heard, the shutter release of my DSLR came like claps of thunder. So I resorted to just watch the whole thing rather than draw the wrath of the assembled mob of free software types.

GPLv3 has finally taken flight. It’ll be a lot of work to re-license all the GNU tools under GPLv3 but the process has already begun. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens.

Update (14 July): The announcement from RMS.