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Intellectual Property and Open Source
book

Intellectual Property and Open Source

by Van Lindberg
July 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
384 pages
13h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Intellectual Property and Open Source

Appendix L. The GNU General Public License, Version 3, June 2007

The GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 3

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Preamble

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program—to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

For example, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596517960Errata Page