Media Contact: Free Software Foundation pr@gnu.org Phone: +1-617-542-5942
BOSTON - February 21, 2006 - The 2nd international GPLv3 conference will take place on April 21st & 22nd in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update GNU General Public License ("the GPL") which today protects the freedom of 100s of millions of software users and is the most used Free Software license in the world.
The conference will take place during the 7th International Free Software Forum, which takes place from April 19th to the 22nd.
Like the current GPL, version 3 will work to guarantee that all users of software distributed under its terms have the freedom to examine, share, and modify that software.
Version 2 of the GPL was released in 1991. It is now being updated to account for changes in the legal and technical environment in which software licenses operate, and to protect against new threats to the freedoms of software users such as software patents and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).
The new version will also incorporate what has been learned over the last 15 years about enforcing a single software license in varying legal systems around the world, and with the 2nd international GPLv3 conference, the current draft of GPL version 3 will receive particular scrutiny from lawyers and software users of Latin America. A main goal of these conferences is to get input from free software users in all parts of the world.
The main changes in the text are those which would make GPLv3 compatible with other Free Software licenses. That is to say that programmers will be able to combine GPLv3-covered code with code distributed under some other Free Software licenses which version 2 would have prohibited.
We invite you join us at FISL for the second round of presentations and discussions, with both international and Latin American perspectives.
Confirmed speakers include Richard Stallman, founder and president of Free Software Foundation (FSF), who will introduce the new draft, and Richard Fontana, lawyer at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), who will provide legal interpretation. Expert panelists form across Latin America will lead discussion on license internationalization, DRM, software patents, and license compatibility.
The Conference's schedule and further information will be published soon at http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/International_conferences
About the Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software - particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants - and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their Web site, located at www.fsf.org , is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Their headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
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