The wheels have been set in motion for the first rewriting of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in more than 15 years, with the release of a document specifying the process and guidelines of the historic revision.
The most important licence for free and open source software, the GPL underpins nearly three quarters of free software programs.
The first draft up for discussion will be presented at the International Public Conference for GPL v3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 and 17 January 2006. This will be followed by a period of response and redrafting from the community to create a second draft in the summer and a final draft in the autumn. The finished GPL v3 is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2007.