The General Public Licence has been overhauled by the Free Software Foundation. Version 3 is supposed to be released in March. And all the software written by the GNU Foundation, the FSF's sister organisation, will move over to the new licence, which we'll call GPLv3 from now on.

The Linux kernel will stay under the existing version of the GPL - version 2. So says the kernel creator, Linus Benedict Torvalds. Let's call it GPLv2.

Why is the GPL being changed? There are some manufacturers who have managed to adhere to the word of GPL Version 2 - and at the same time evade it. With increasing use of digital rights management (DRM) - or digital restrictions management as some put it - and patents, to corner and control market segments, changes have been deemed necessary to prevent the public being denied what the FSF considers to be essential freedoms.

The GPLv3 will insist that if someone sells a software binary then, since he or she is also required to provide the source, along with that comes a requirement to provide whatever it takes to authorise a recompiled version to run. Patents are another problem. The GPL says that anything touched by it has to take on the same licence. A company that bundles software licensed under the GPL with its hardware would then lose the right to enforce any patents.

In the red corner of this licence debate is Richard Matthew Stallman, the charismatic founder of the GNU Foundation, without whom there would be no free software movement. In the blue corner is Torvalds, the technically gifted nerd from Finland, who conceived of, and wrote, the Linux kernel.

They seem unlikely partners in a joint venture. But all Stallman's (and his fellow developers') work in producing libraries, compilers, text editors, and a shell would have gone in vain had it not been for the kernel which Torvalds and his fellow geeks had developed. At that stage what Stallman was lacking was a kernel, device drivers and daemons - the lower level stuff.