Richard Stallman, author of the GNU General Public License (GPL) has announced that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is to revise the key licence that governs the use of free software.

The current version of GPL was completed about 15 years ago. The new version of the GNU software licence will be called GPLv3 and is expected to be released in spring 2007.

A key motivation behind the revision is the need for a worldwide, rather than US-centric copyright. Stallman said that the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are working on world copyright standardisation.

He stated that the current version of GPL was designed for global use and distribution, but it is no longer suitable considering the expansion of free software and new modes for distribution. The potential for unintended consequences has increased because of those changes, he added.

Research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2010 more than 75 per cent of IT organisations will have formal acquisition and management strategies dealing with free software. As a result, business enterprises, as well as individual users and developers, will have an interest in the content of the new licence.

The guiding principle for developing the GPL is to defend the freedom of all users," said Stallman.

"As we address the issues raised by the community, we will do so in terms of the four basic freedoms software users are entitled to: to study, copy, modify and redistribute the software they use. GPLv3 will be designed to protect those freedoms under current technical and social conditions and will address new forms of use and current global requirements for commercial and non-commercial users."

He used cooking as an analogy of the issues being faced. Recipes are freely distributed among friends and family members, modified, then distributed in their modified versions. Stallman said that recipes and software fall into a category of intellectual property with functional or practical use. He pointed to Wikipedia as an example of how something is created and distributed without limits.

After publishing the first discussion draft of the GPL in January, the FSF will begin a structured process of eliciting feedback from the community, with the goal of producing a final draft in late 2006.