GPL v3

Speaker: Ciaran O'Riordan

The collective drafting of a shared software licence is something the free software community has not done before. The GNU GPL has been an immensely successful licence in terms of adoption and in that it has been held up in court - but the legal and technical environment has changed since version 2 was published in 1991.

The discussion has been sometimes oversimplified. In this session, O'Riordan would like to discuss when and how (not if) DRM and patents should be protected against. As well as explaining what is being doing about internationalisation and licence enforcement. The aim for this session is to stimulate constructive criticism to help make the thired draft even better.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Ciaran O'Riordan is a Brussels-based software rights lobbyist, originally from Ireland. A user of free software, such as GNU/Linux, since 1998, O'Riordan has a background is in writing software. He began focussing on the legislative aspects of software rights in 2003, becoming particularly active in the campaign against software patents in Europe. Since then he has taken up public speaking and expanded his work on EU directives on topics such as copyright, patents, and enforcement of laws which relate wholly or partly to software. He was a founder of Irish Free Software Organisation in January 2004. Continuing his lobbying work, he relocated to Brussels in August 2004. In April 2005, he was hired by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to continue his lobbying work full-time. Today, O'Riordan is still a full-time employee of FSFE and as well as his lobbying work, he has become active in raising awareness of the revision process for free software's cornerstone software licence: the GNU General Public License.