As many as 150,000 individuals — as well as 8,000 organizations, governments, foundations, groups and businesses around the world — are expected to contribute to and comment on the revised version of the GNU General Public License. The draft is sure to cause plenty of argument and controversy, writes eWeek's Peter Galli.

Version 3 of the GPL is being written by Free Software Foundation founder and original GPL author Richard M. Stallman and the FSF's general counsel, Eben Moglen. Although supporters of the new license are girding for an onslaught of comment and controversy over the next year or so, they remain confident that the open-source community will survive and be made stronger as a result of the effort, Galli writes.

The biggest issues that will be addressed are trusted computing, patent and copyright issues, application service provisioning, and globalization, Galli writes. The public will have a year to comment on the GPL Version 3 draft. The final version is expected in early 2007, more than 15 years after GPL Version 2 was released.

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