After 18 months of widespread consultation with community and corporate interests, the third versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) were released one year ago on 29 June 2007. In November, they were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).

Nearly a year after the Free Software Foundation released an updated version of the General Public License - the GPLv3 - there appears to be a great deal of confusion about what the license actually means, if one goes by two recent publications.

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Monday, November 19, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

"The Free Software Foundation has published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software..."

"For all that a great deal of attention was given to the arrival of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License, version 3), few software developers announced plans to move their programs to this new license. Now, open-source programmers are beginning to give the new license a try."

"After a year and a half of public consultation, thousands of comments, and four drafts, version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was finally published on June 29. While there's been a lot of discussion about the license since the first draft appeared, not many people have talked about the benefits that it provides developers. We've published this guide to fill that gap.

How is the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) being received four months after its official release?

"The Free Software Foundation today released the final version of the new GNU General Public License, GPLv3. Novell welcomes and supports GPLv3 and we appreciate the collaborative process that led to its conclusion."

"The license changes keep coming. While work is wrapping up on the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), the Free Software Foundation has released the first discussion draft of the Affero GPLv3."