This website is an archive. It was used for drafting and public consultation on GPLv3 and version 3 of other GNU licenses which were published in 2007. For up to date information, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html. For more information about this archive, see https://www.fsf.org/licensing/gplv3-archive

From GPLv3 Wiki

A few tips on getting the most out of the commenting system, pending "real" documentation:

Contents 1 Submitting Comments 2 Views 2.1 Default View 2.2 List View 3 Feeds 4 Source

Submitting Comments

In addition to the browser interface, comments can be submitted by email.

The system is designed so that comments must be attached to pieces of text in the existing draft. This is to keep discussion focused on the work at hand, which is to get the license text right.

If you feel like your comment does not apply to any specific existing text, then consider what would need to be added to the license text in order to address your comment. Would the license need an entirely new section? Then attach your comment to the title of the license itself. Would an existing section need a new subsection? Then you could attach your comment to the existing section title. If your comment suggests a change in the overall philosophy in the license, then perhaps text would need to be added to the preamble -- so you could attach your comment to the Preamble title.

Views

Default View

You can click on the highlighting on a particular section in order to see the comments pertaining to that section. At the end of each paragraph, there are two characters in light purple: ¶ and →.

• ¶ is a link to that paragraph's #anchor in the license text, so that a browser will jump directly to that point in the document.
• → loads all the comments on the whole section, to spare you from clicking on every different-colored span to load them all individually.

You may also limit the selection of comments that are used to highlight the text, narrowing the display to the comments you are interested in. Click "search" on the statusbar, and enter your search criteria.

To see only the comments on a specific section, choose a section under "Section id is [ - ]"; this lets you choose among the major sections of the license draft. You can also learn the section id by going to "read/say more" for a comment from that section (where the section id is also a link to the query for all comments on that section). You can switch between the license view and the list/threaded view with the "see on license" and "list" links on the status bar.

List View

To see a list-view of the comments and issues, use the list link. As the drafting process goes on, comments are being grouped together into common issues for the drafters to evaluate. This view is good for seeing what those issues are and which comments pertain to each issue. The "collapse children" links on the list view page are supposed to enable you to see only the top-level issues and selectively ignore their children, but in some cases, apparently due to a bug in the Prototype javascript library, this doesn't work out. We're working on it.

Feeds

The RSS feed linked at the top of each page is a feed for the search query that is currently being shown. So you may subscribe to a feed just of comments on section "License Compatibility" or "Licensing of Patents", or even (by hacking the location field) on "licensingpatents.p0.s1". Or "s1" to see all the comments on the first sentences of all paragraphs. Or on comments by a particular user, or comments containing particular text...

Source

The current (daunting-to-install) source is available.