"There are many concurrent ongoing dangers in the world of Free Software. Among them, you will finde software patents, hidden restrictions in obnoxious licences and trademark lawsuits which seem to be absolutely unavoidable unless one has deep pockets filled with money for defence. Recently, expensive interoperability clauses have been added to the mix. Formerly, protection against such issues was achieved by adding condemnations to existing licences. With the GPLv3, such protection comes built-in. (This change is still argued about, but it’s certainly a good idea to not having to draft up the clauses on your own. The GNU project is known to be political in many ways, and in most cases that’s a good thing.)

However, there is more to it, and probably I haven’t been explicit enough in the past. In order to provide a posting for future reference, I want to elaborate on the danger of service lock-in." -- Read more