For the past 26 weeks I've been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I've received a few pieces of mail saying this is a'non-free' licence and questioning my use of it here.

For the second time in six months, a flamefest has broken out between those who release software under the BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) licence and others who release software under the General Public Licence.

"The Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) has been around in one form or another since the Gnu manifesto published by Richard Stallman in 1985. The free software movement founded at that time has not simply created the most successful copyright licence ever, it has acted as a guide to other, similar movements..."

Samba project leader Jeremy Allison has accused Microsoft of trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public Licence, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals.

The fact that the General Public Licence, better known as the GPL, is oft misunderstood, even by those who could be expected to know better, came home to me with a vengeance yesterday.

Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin. Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.

A recent report, "GPLv2 vs. GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences, and repercussions", compiled by Liz Laffan of VisonMobile, examines the new terms and differences introduced by the third version of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and assesses the probable impact it will have on the software market in general and the mobile industry in particular.

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).

The GNU General Public Licence is falling in popularity, according to figures released by Black Duck that looked at all versions of the GPL as a whole.