GNU General Public License version 3

After a year and a half of public consultation, thousands of comments, and four drafts, version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was finally published on June 29, 2007. While there's been a lot of discussion about the license since the first draft appeared, not many people have talked about the benefits that it provides developers. We've published this guide to fill that gap. We'll start with a brief refresher on free software, copyleft, and the goals of the GPL. We'll then review the major changes in the license to see how they advance those goals and benefit developers.