GPLv3 discussion committees: “Draft 2 includes our input”

Posted by ciaran on 0

A Newsforge journalist contacted the GPLv3 discussion committees to ask if they are being listened to by FSF, and if the 2nd draft of GPLv3 includes they’re input. All who responded said yes to both.

Here’s the story: Torvalds’ comments on GPLv3 committees refuted. The reason for that title is that Linus Torvalds said last week that he heard that FSF had ignored the discussion committees. I’m glad to hear his information was wrong.

That article doesn’t explain the role of the discussion committees, so I’ll just sketch it out quickly here.

The discussion committees are made up of people who have some interest in making the GNU GPL as good as possible. This includes many who are not supporters of the free software movement’s goals.

There are four committees, grouped by topic, with a total of something like 130 members:

Each comment that the public submits through gplv3.fsf.org goes to these committees where they group the comments into issues, and collect all the views on these issues and suggestions for how to address them.

For more information on the process, see FSFE’s GPLv3 project page.