Honestly the GPLv3 really isn't that radical. It has three major changes along with a bunch of more minor cleanups and improvements: 1. Protections against pat

Honestly the GPLv3 really isn't that radical. It has three major changes along with a bunch of more minor cleanups and improvements: 1. Protections against patent trolls (similar to Apache-2.0, so this is a clear improvement over the GPLv2 which didn't protect users from patent trolls at all). 2. The enforcement provisions were made much less harsh (the GPLv2 immediately terminates your rights upon any violation of the GPLv2) with a curing period so that distributions could rectify honest mistakes without losing their rights. These two are both clearly improvements over the GPLv2 (so much so that many distributions in the Linux community have explicitly promised to only enforce GPLv3-style enforcement for non-compliance of their Linux copyrights[1]). 3. The "tivoisation clause". This one is probably the most controversial change, but honestly it's actually a fairly understandable extension of this clause of the GPLv2 (s3): > For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. In 1991, firmware keys and walled-gardens were unheard of and so I would expect that most people living in 1991 would expect the above line to mean that you should be given everything required to install a program (including if it came with a piece of hardware). You may not personally feel that this is reasonable, but given that the FSF's main goal is complete software freedom, I am surprised people can't see the above clause from their perspective. Today we know that firmware keys aren't part of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable" and so with the GPLv2 you can still get locked down devices. Hence the "tivoisation clause". [1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/gplv3-enforcement-statement https://www.redhat.com/en/about/gplv3-enforcement-statement