Some changes to the license include the following text, found in the draft document:
When you distribute a covered work, you grant a patent license to the recipient, and to anyone that receives any version of the work permitting, for any and all versions."
Moglen also said that while he and Stallman were not "grand theorists of patent retaliation, we have been saying for 20 years that patents would be a terrible threat to software freedom, and I hope it is clear to all now that we were correct."
GPL 3.0 in its current form would bring unlimited rights to use software under the GPL, but would also prevent anyone trying to use patents to stop others from making amendments.
The distribution clauses have been only slightly modified and no changes have been made that would make any existing distribution fall outside the GPL, Moglen said. "No one must come to the conclusion they must fight to remain in the community if what they were doing was legal under the GPL 2.0 and nothing they were doing was restricting user rights in some sort of DRM-ish way," he said.
The "copyleft" clause of the license has been modified for greater clarity. Copyleft is a method for making a program, and all its successive versions, free. "Anyone who has a copy of the binary is entitled to a copy of the source, no matter how they came upon it. Notices of copyright status and attribution have also been modified," he said.
"GPL 2.0 was as strong a copyleft license as could be, and we have now added additional permissions, or exceptions, as they were known under GPL 2.0. GPL 3.0 formalizes that and has some additional rules," he said.
The concept of unwritten permissions had caused a certain amount of grief and "was a provision we no longer wished to renew," Moglen said.
In other changes, any permissive free software licenses that were not compatible with GPL 2.0 would now be compatible with GPL 3.0, he said. "For example, the patent requirements of the Eclipse License meet the requirements of this license as well as ASL, which are separated from GPL 2 by their patent retaliation terms. Were this draft discussion document the actual GPL 3.0 license, the Eclipse Public License would be compatible with it," Moglen said.
Asked which free and open-source licenses would not be compatible with GPL 3.0, Stallman said the BSD Advertising clause was still not allowed, as going against the goals of the license.
Moglen added that the goal was to take permissive licenses and to make them compatible with the GPL wherever possible, particularly where unintentional content had caused them to be incompatible.
But there are still licenses with forms of patent retaliation that could be used in aggression, and those would still be incompatible with the GPL because the treatment of patent retaliation remained overly broad, he said.
Next Page: Issues still on the table.
Linux & Open Source 
