Efforts under way to revise the popular GNU General Public License could put additional pressure on Microsoft Corp. by the time it tries to push its long-awaited Windows upgrades out the door. As eWEEK reported last week, the Free Software Foundation is working to revamp the GPL—the first such rewrite in 13 years. Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Boston-based FSF, who is co-authoring the new license with FSF founder Richard Stallman, has declined to say when Version 3 of the license will be ready.
"We need it to be right, and the community needs to be available and adopt it and make good out of it," Moglen told eWEEK. But several sources close to the FSF said that from a strategic point of view, the best possible timing would be to have a draft of the next version of the GPL ready before the end of next year. Following that, a global summit on licensing would be convened in 2006, the sources said.