The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license A free software licence is a software licence which grants recipients rights to modify and redistribute the software which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright law. A free software licence grants, to the recipients, freedoms in the form of permissions to modify or distribute copyrighted work, originally written by Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman , often abbreviated to "rms", is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free for the GNU project The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated the GNU operating system, software development for which began in January 1984. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software.
The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL grants the recipients of a computer program Computer programs are instructions for a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its human-readable source code form, from which executable the rights of the free software definition The Free Software Definition, written by Richard Stallman and published by Free Software Foundation , defines free software, as a matter of liberty, not price. The term "free" is used in the sense of "free speech," not of "free beer." The earliest known publication of the definition was in the February 1986 edition of and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses A permissive free software licence is also a free software licence that applies to an otherwise copyrighted work. As such, it also offers many of the same rights found in free software licences when releasing a work to the public domain. In contrasts to non-permissive copyleft licences such as the GNU General Public License, however, any copies, of which the BSD licenses BSD licenses represent a family of permissive free software licenses. The original was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which the license is named. The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The are the standard examples.
The GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The GNU Lesser General Public License was written in 1991 (and (LGPL) is a modified, more permissive, version of the GPL, originally intended for some software libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of subroutines or classes used to develop software. Libraries contain code and data that provide services to independent programs. This allows the sharing and changing of code and data in a modular fashion. Some executables are both standalone programs and libraries, but most libraries are not. There is also a GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license, which was originally intended for use with documentation for GNU software, but has also been adopted for other uses, such as the Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based and collaborative multilingual encyclopedia, born in the project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 13 million articles (2.9 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of project.
The Affero General Public License Both versions of the AGPL were designed to close a perceived application service provider "loophole" in the ordinary GPL, where by using but not distributing the software, the copyleft provisions are not triggered. Each version differs from the version of the GNU GPL on which it is based in having an additional provision addressing use (GNU AGPL) is a similar license with a focus on networking server software. The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it additionally covers the use of the software over a computer network, requiring that the complete source code be made available to any network user of the AGPLed work, for example a web application. The Free Software Foundation recommends that this license is considered for any software that will commonly be run over the network.
The text of the GPL is not itself under the GPL. The license's copyright disallows modification of the license. Copying and distributing the license is allowed since the GPL requires recipients get a "a copy of this License along with the Program".[1] According to the GPL FAQ, anyone can modify the license as long as they use a different name for the license, not mention "GNU" and remove the preamble. The preamble can be used in a modified license with permission of the FSF. However, the only license to have permission of the preamble was version 1 of the Affero General Public License Both versions of the AGPL were designed to close a perceived application service provider "loophole" in the ordinary GPL, where by using but not distributing the software, the copyleft provisions are not triggered. Each version differs from the version of the GNU GPL on which it is based in having an additional provision addressing use.
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