highvoltage has already blogged about it, but I just wanted to remark upon the launch of the GNU GPL version 3.0. Reading those words
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
was quite disturbing. Not in a bad way; it just felt really weird to see the number 3 there. Ever since I’ve been involved with free software, the GPL has been at version 2. I can’t count the number of times I’ve copied those familiar paragraphs into the beginning of a source file, or that familiar COPYING file into a new project.
Other than that, I’m quite happy with the new license. Despite the FUD that has been spread about it, it actually seems perfectly reasonable. The new anti-”tivoisation” and patent licensing clauses are appropriate to the aims of the FSF. True, they inconvenience the “corporate open source” world, which sometimes seems to want to use free software for the convenience while actually avoiding granting users the freedoms we expect. I don’t see this as a problem.
The biggest problem I do see is that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are mutually incompatible. We already have so much trouble with incompatible licenses between different bits of free software with essentially similar licensing goals and it’s irritating that we now have another incompatibility to deal with. (On the other hand, GPLv3 is now compatible with the Apache License, which is an improvement.)