From the Talkin' GPL dept.:
Eben Moglen is a man who wears many hats: professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Last week at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, I sat down with Moglen to get an update on the draft process of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), his opinion on modified versions of the GPL, and the status of the SFLC.

According to Moglen, the GPLv3 draft process is now "at the halfway point in every sense." Moglen says that they are now entering "the most serious part of the negotiations," to convince stakeholders that the GPLv3 is an improvement over the GPLv2. The discussions on the second draft should continue through mid-October, and then a last call draft should be released in mid-November. Moglen says that he is confident that the final draft of the GPLv3 will be released by March 2007, which is in keeping with the timeline set in the GPLv3 Process Definition.

Moglen didn't go into many specifics of the changes found in the second draft, but he did note that there were "substantial changes" in "all major operating provisions of the license," including changes to section 1, dealing with corresponding source code, and the DRM section. A guide to the new draft is available on the FSF site.

linux.com