The GPL Bargain
The world of software was transformed by the GNU General Public License. The word GNU in the license name is a play on words by the license author, Richard Stallman. “The name GNU was chosen following a hacker tradition,” he says, “as a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix.'” Throughout the world, the license is mostly referred to simply as the GPL. (The GPL is reprinted in the Appendices.)
The GPL has been enormously influential in creating a large public commons of software that is freely available to everyone worldwide. As the GPL advocates might describe it in political tones, they have prevented much software from being captured by proprietary software interests and converted into restricted private property for personal ...
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