Blackmoor Vituperative

The first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License was finally released on Monday, and addresses the issues of patents and patent-related retaliation, as well as its compatibility with other licenses.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the original license, was the first to take the floor here at the First International Conference on GPLv3 at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), to express his vision for the new license. […]

The biggest changes to the license were in the area of license compatibility, removing the obstacles that prevented it from being combined with code from other free software packages. […]

The other biggest changes to the license were regarding the issue of DRM (Digital Rights Management), which was seen as denying users the freedom to control the software they had.

“DRM is a malicious feature and can never be tolerated, as DRM is fundamentally based on activities that cannot be done with free software. That is its goal and it is in direct opposition to ours. But, with the new GPL, we can now prevent our software from being perverted or corrupted,” he said.

A patent license grant has now also been included, as well as a narrow kind of patent retaliation clause. “If person A makes a modified version of a GPL-covered program and then gets a patent on that and says if anyone else makes such a modified version, they will be sued, he then loses the right to make any modifications, meaning he can’t commercially use his software,” Stallman said.

While the license does not require that the modified version be released, it does ensure that others would not be prevented from writing similar modifications under the license, he said.

(from eWeek, GPL 3.0 Draft Tackles Patents, Compatibility)

These sound like good changes to me. If you want more detail (and you should), you can read the full text of the GPL 3.0. You may also want to check out the Free Software Foundation’s rationale for the changes in GPL 3.0.