'Changes to GPL beneficial for government's use of Open Source'

The new version of the GNU General Public Licens (GPLv3) has increased the usefulness of the licence to the French government, says Thierry Aimé, an IT architect at the French ministry of Finance.

The improvements in internationalisation and compatibility with the Apache software licence make the GPLv3 more useful for the Ministry, which uses a lot of Open Source. Clauses in the GPLv3 dealing with patents and digital rights management are of no concern, Aim\\303\\251 explained in a presentation at a meeting of European Open Source Lawyers held in Paris on 24 September.

The ministry can accept propositions from companies that propose to use software published with the GPLv3. “The licence applicable to the software is not part of the contract with the public administration.” Neither is it a problem that the GPL is written in English, he added.

Article written for Osor.eu.