August 2004
Beginner to intermediate
208 pages
8h 3m
English
Content preview from Understanding Open Source and Free Software LicensingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Application and Philosophy
The GPL and MPL both have had symbolic as well as practical impacts in the world of software development. Those effects of these licenses, beyond their strict terms, are described next.
The GPL License and the Free Software Philosophy
The impact of the GPL, and its offshoot, the LGPL, on the development of software cannot be overstated. The GPL project that grew up with the license, the GNU/Linux constellation of applications, better known simply as Linux,[19] has seen its acceptance by users grow steadily from the early 1990s to the point where it now poses the only significant competitor to the Windows operating system.
This success, depending on your point of view, arises either because of, or despite, the fact that the GPL bars any development of software from GPL-licensed software that is not itself GPL licensed. The GPL seems to embody the maxim that "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."[20] By requiring that all contributions to GPL projects be themselves GPL licensed, the GPL ensures not only that these contributions are available to other programmers (or at least those programmers willing to work within the GPL framework) but also encourages contributions from those programmers to whom it is important that their contributions be made, and remain, "free," as that term is used in the GPL.
The existence of such programmers is by now beyond dispute. Based on the success of the GNU/Linux project alone, the free software project has succeeded. Part ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.