Free Software Foundation releases version 3 of the GPL
Although June 29, 2007 will probably be most remembered for the release of some cellphone, another release that will hugely affect the tech community went out on that fateful Friday -- version three of the GNU General Public License was officially released, revising the terms that govern the use and distribution of many open-source projects, including Linux. A major goal of the revisions was to prevent the use of free code in closed devices (known charmingly as "tivoization"), drawing criticism from Linus Torvalds, Tivo (naturally), and others, but the Free Software Foundation maintains that the changes will be beneficial to end users. We're all for device makers opening up their boxes, but we're not sure forcing them to do so via license restrictions is the way to do it -- we'll see how this plays out in the future.
