"For the past couple of weeks, I have been more than a little pensive about the nature of the new GNU General Public License (v3). Since the last set of drafts have come out, I have been concerned that the whole thing seems obstructionist to what I believe we should be focusing on: getting computers to work together and moving past this whole will-they-won't-they interoperability nonsense."

"Microsoft sought to avoid tangling itself up in the GPL license when it struck a deal with Novell. Rather than pay Novell, it agreed to hand out SUSE Linux coupons to consumers. It stayed at arms length from distributing the code… But did Microsoft circumvent the trap of GPLv2 by stepping into the snare of GPLv3?"

Video available of this announcement. You can watch Stallman give an overview of the major changes in the license, and his reflections on the drafting process.

Highest Quality (103MB): http://gplv3.fsf.org/static/release/rms_gplv3_launch_high_quality.ogg
BitTorrent: http://gplv3.fsf.org/static/release/rms_gplv3_launch_high_quality.ogg.to...

Right now, Linus ain’t happy, not at all. Especially about GPLv3. He considers the anti-Tivoization provisions in the new license, which keep you from crippling hardware containing software using the license, to be…well, take it away Linus...

"Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites and likened them to religious fanatics -- the latest sign of a growing schism in the open source community between business-minded developers like Torvalds and free software purists."

"Now that Microsoft has declared itself untouched by any GPLv3 terms, everyone is trying to figure out if they have a leg to stand on. There is a whole lot of analysis going on, with some wondering if Microsoft is a distributor of software under GPLv3 by means of the voucher distribution and others wondering just what those vouchers included."

The third version of the General Public Licence (GPLv3) has been adopted by 116 open source projects in its first week of operation, according to an overview compiled by software risk management firm Palamida.

I'm at a loss to say which is more audacious, Microsoft's world-is-flat claim or its expectation that people will believe it. That's how I judge Microsoft's outrageous assertion that it's not bound by GPLv3. Right, and the world is a cube.