The first draft of the General Public License version 3 will be released on January 16 at a conference organized to help develop the standard. The First International Conference on GPLv3 will take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Free Software Foundation said Wednesday.

The current version of the GPL is 15 years old, and does not address many of the issues that play a role in modern computing. Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, first announced that it would be working towards a new version of the GPL in November.

Stallman says the GPL would still give users four basic freedoms when using software covered under the licensing structure: the ability to study, copy, modify and redistribute the software they use.

After the first draft of the GPL version 3 is released next week, the FSF will then invite feedback from the software community at large. A second draft of the license is expected next summer, with a final draft set for fall. The final version will be released no later than spring of 2007.

Some issues to be undertaken by the new version of the license include protection from companies who attempt to sue GPL developers over patent issues, GPL software use on DRM-capable devices, and modifications to policies surrounding how GPL software can be used on the Internet.

"The guiding principle for developing the GPL is to defend the freedom of all users," Stallman has said.