"Liberty Or Death": A Frist Draft of GPL V 3 has been Published.
The Draft is availabe here. It has some interesting points on patents:
"[...] Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the special danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL makes it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. [...]
This License gives unlimited permission to privately modify and run the Program, provided you do not bring suit for patent infringement against anyone for making, using or distributing their own works based on the Program. [...]
Distribution of the Corresponding Source in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented, unencumbered by patents, and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying. [...]
Aside from additional permissions, your terms may add limited kinds of additional requirements on your added parts, as follows:
[...]
e) They may impose software patent retaliation, which means permission for use of your added parts terminates or may be terminated, wholly or partially, under stated conditions, for users closely related to any party that has filed a software patent lawsuit (i.e., a lawsuit alleging that some software infringes a patent). The conditions must limit retaliation to a subset of these two cases: 1. Lawsuits that lack the justification of retaliating against other software patent lawsuits that lack such justification. 2. Lawsuits that target part of this work, or other code that was elsewhere released together with the parts you added, the whole being under the terms used here for those parts. [...]
When you distribute a covered work, you grant a patent license to the recipient, and to anyone that receives any version of the work, permitting, for any and all versions of the covered work, all activities allowed or contemplated by this License, such as installing, running and distributing versions of the work, and using their output. This patent license is nonexclusive, royalty-free and worldwide, and covers all patent claims you control or have the right to sublicense, at the time you distribute the covered work or in the future, that would be infringed or violated by the covered work or any reasonably contemplated use of the covered work.
If you distribute a covered work knowingly relying on a patent license, you must act to shield downstream users against the possible patent infringement claims from which your license protects you.
12.[7] Liberty or Death for the Program.
If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute the Program, or other covered work, so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute it at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other exclusive rights or to contest their legal validity. The sole purpose of this section is to protect the integrity of the free software distribution system. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice. [...]"
So, it looks as if RMS and his team would have, under real-world conditions with valid and enforceable patents also on computer-implemented inventions, effectively choosen "death" for OSS under the GNU GPL instrad of accepting any kind of a reasonable compromise. This discussion on GPL V 3 has just started. There is still a real chance for improvement.
here. It has some interesting points on patents: