In an announcement sure to distract from the pending iPhone sales frenzy (kidding), yesterday afternoon Richard Stallman announced that GPLv3 would be released on Friday. You can watch live video at 12pm tomorrow of the unveiling via the Free Software Foundation website: http://fsf.org/.

The GPLv3 discussion seems to have hit a boiling point, with Linus Torvalds surveying the top 29 most active Linux kernel developers in an attempt to dispel the notion he’s out-of-line regarding his public dismay over the changes made to the prominent license’s latest draft version.

As it turns out, 28 of the 29 contributors rated GPLv3 worse than its predecessor. The survey results have been posted to the Linux-Kernel mailing list, available here. News.com offers a great summary here.

Regardless of your opinion, what’s clear is the new license is bound to cause a fairly serious rift in the open source community. Ten of the most active kernel developers outline why this is so in a paper published on Friday. Don’t miss the great commentary directly following the paper.

Jason

The International Open Source Network, part of the United Nations Development Project, has released a free eBook: Free/Open Source Software Licensing, written by Shun-ling Chen. Perhaps uniquely the guide is written for both developers and end-users, such as those who may be implementing open source software in their working environment. As well as providing practical advice, the book also explains the fundamentals of free software/open source and why they’re so important. To quote:

Legal issues may vary in different situations and this e-primer may not be able to provide answers to all situations. But, hopefully, it will serve as a bridge between lawyers and non-lawyers in this joint venture of FOSS development.

The eBook can be downloaded from this page.