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The purpose of the GPL is to grant any user the right to copy, modify, and redistribute programs and source code from developers that have chosen to license their work under the GPL. The GPL ensures that certain freedoms are preserved in copies and in derivative works via a copyleft mechanism, a concept created by Richard Stallman. In contrast, end-user licenses for proprietary software rarely grant the end user any rights, and even purport to restrict activities such as reverse engineering that may be permitted under law. The GPL differs from simple permissive free software licenses, like the BSD License. Simple permissive licenses place no restrictions or protections on derivative works whereas derivative works of GPL licensed code must also be licensed under the GPL.
The GPL protects, using copyright law, the following freedoms for users and developers of free software:
The GPL is the most popular license for free software. The GNU/Linux operating system together with the Linux Kernel is by far the most successful GPL licensed product. As of April 2004 the GPL accounted for 74.6% of the 23,479 projects with an OSI approved open source license listed on Freshmeat. The GPL also accounted for 68.5% of the 52,182 free or open source software projects listed on SourceForge. Note that these two sites are owned by OSTG, a company created to advocate Linux and the GPL.
A 2001 survey of Red Hat LinuxRed Hat Linux is a Linux distribution, which was one of the most popular. It is assembled by Red Hat. It is one of the "middle-aged" Linux distributions; 1. 0 was released in November 3, 1994. It is not as old as Slackware, but certainly older than many o 7.1 found that 50% of the source-code lines were licensed under the GPL. A 1997 survey of Metalab , then the largest free-software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the licenses used. [1]
The GPL was written by Richard Stallman for use with programs released as part of the GNU projectFor the African animal gnu see wildebeest. logo Believed to be the original artwork of Etienne Suvasa GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix". The GNU project was launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a complete operating. It was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU EmacsThis article is about the text editor. For the Apple Macintosh computer model, see eMac. Emacs is a text editor with a comprehensive set of features that is particularly popular with programmers and other technical computer users. The original Emacs was w, the GNU DebuggerThe GNU Debugger usually called just GDB is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. It is a portable debugger which runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including C, C++, and FORTRAN. Originally written by Ri and the GNU Compiler CollectionThe GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. It is free software distributed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) under the GNU GPL, and is a key component of the GNU toolch. These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program. Stallman's goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible for many projects to share code. This became the GPL version 1, released in January 19891989 is a common year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). Events January January 7 Akihito becomes Emperor of Japan following the death of Hirohito. The Heisei period begins January 8 the Kegworth Air Disaster A British Midland Boeing 737 cra.
By 1990, it was becoming apparent that the GPL was in some cases too restrictive for software libraries; this led to the Library General Public License (LGPL) version 2, released in June 1991. The Library GPL was renamed to the Lesser General Public License in 1999.
Released simultaneously with the LGPL was the GPL version 2, intended to clarify the terms of the GPL.
Since the GPL's introduction, it has become the most widely-used free software license. Most of the programs in the GNU project are licensed under either the GPL or the LGPL, including GCC, GNU Emacs and the GNOME desktop. Furthermore, all products licensed under the LGPL are also licensed under the GPL, as per section 3 of the LGPL. As of February 2004, out of 22,648 projects total with OSI-approved open source licenses on Freshmeat, 17,000 projects were licensed under the GPL and 1,926 under the LGPL.
The Free Software Foundation is writing version 3 of the GPL. Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman are the primary authors. This version may include an anti- DMCA clause, provisions intended to address concerns with Trusted Computing, a clarification of the patent license grant and a provision that source code must be available to users who use the software over a network. [2] A prototype for the network portion is the Affero General Public License [3]. It is expected to be released by June, 2006.
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