The Preamble to the GPL
Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, the authors of the GPL, write eloquently in the GPL's preamble about their primary objective in creating the license:
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software—to make sure the software is free for all its users. (GPL Preamble.)
Eloquence, by the way, and discussions of public policy, are extremely rare in licenses; attorneys will recall no other such example from their law school courses in technology licensing. That is one feature that stands out about the GPL. It was the obvious intention of the authors of the GPL to ...
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