For those of you into the software industry and in particular, the open source industry, you might be interested in knowing that GLP 3 has finally been released. The core portion of the General Public License 3 remains unchanged from version 2 which was released 16 years ago. According to GPL 3, anyone can view, modify, or redistribute the underlying source code of a GPL governed project. Should you change the source code and redistribute it, you need to publish those changes.

Here are some of the major things that changed according to News.com

• The license carries an explicit patent grant. If you provide software to a GPL project, you will grant a perpetual royalty-free license to any of your patents on that software.
• According to Brett Smith – “If you arrange to provide patent protection to some of the people who get the software from you, that protection is automatically extended to everyone who receives the software, no matter how they get it”
• Anti-tivoization – If you own a device that uses GPL software, you should be able to download the source code and modify it at will. TiVo objects to this of course because they claim this will be harmful to their business.

You can read more about GPL 3 here at News.com. You can also read the full text of the new license here.

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