GNU Free Documentation License

“ Introducing the GNU General Public License Version 3, 23 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 547, 564–68 (2008) . ↑ See GPLv3, supra note 53, pmbl. (“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.”) . ↑ See James Grimmelmann, The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law, 77 Fordham L. Rev. ”

“ Even if hackers could demonstrate how a given program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years, if not decades, the resources and money that went into battling each copyright notice were beyond most hackers' means. Simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled lawyer-to-lawyer. In such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage.
Proponents of software copyright had their counter-arguments: without copyright, works might otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a copyright notice on a work also served as a statement of quality. ”

“ The Preamble of GPLv3 includes the following clause (versions of which also appeared in GPLv1 and GPLv2) explaining the function of the license: “Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.” [57]
Every version of the GPL grants users of the licensed software the rights to engage in the otherwise-infringing acts of copying, [58] modifying, [59] and redistributing [60] the licensed work. ”

“ The success of GNU/Linux has led to a larger free software movement as well as the “open source” movement, which releases software and its source code under copyright licenses that provide some of the software freedoms. ”

“ For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. See Shubha Ghosh, "Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code," Gigalaw.com (January, 2000) .
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2000-all/ghosh-2000-01-all.html Killer apps don't have to be proprietary. Witness, of course, the legendary Mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. Still, I think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. The bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate. ”

“ The goal is to prevent people from taking free material and incorporating it in unfree contexts in such a way as to reproprietize what has been freely chosen. And accordingly, when Stallman set himself to the free culture problem – defining culture fairly narrowly as technical reference manuals at the first go round – we got a license in the GNU Free Document License which was equally intensively committed to protecting as to facilitating. ”

“ The Terms of use of the Wikimedia Foundation require that GFDL-licensed text imported after November 2008 must also be dual-licensed with another compatible license. "Content available only under GFDL is not permissible" (§7.4) . ”

“ Following the release of the first version of GPL, Stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license "Copyleft." Over time, the nickname and its symbol, a backwards "C," would become general Free Software Foundation shorthand for any copyright method "making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well."
The German sociologist Max Weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. ”

“ Licensing: Developing a new software license is never a trivial task and this License Agreement has presented special challenges for Hacktivismo. Because of our human rights objectives, this License Agreement includes some specific terms and conditions that, as a technical matter, depart from the previously-recognized and established definitions of "free" [fn11] software and "open source" [fn12] software. ”

“ Ultimately, however, after reviewing the field of possibilities among previously-existing "open source" and "free" licenses, Hacktivismo has concluded that none of them fully meets our requirements. Writing our own License Agreement enables us to pursue our human rights objectives more effectively. This licensing endeavor represents a first step toward achieving our objectives, and no doubt informed feedback, scholarship, and learned commentary will enable us to pursue our objectives even more effectively in the future. ”

“ You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. ”

“ Respect for the Rule of Law means that no governmental entity is above the law, and that no governmental entity should be permitted to use its status as a mechanism for circumventing the requirements of this License Agreement.
Any use, copying or modification of this software by any governmental official or governmental entity anywhere in the world is a voluntary act, which act the governmental official or entity is free to forego if it does not wish to be bound by this License Agreement. ”

“ Make the only layer the abstractive layer, and try and use the same one everywhere. Note that the very task we’re trying to perform with respect to content licenses is equivalent to that problem of the globalization of any license, whether it covers executable code or it covers free culture. We’re going to see, in the next few years, a series of licenses that do a job like the one Larry is talking about, for code only. ”

“ A fundamental goal of FOSS is to promote the free exchange of ideas and technology without fear of infringing the rights of others. Ideally, code licensed under like-minded FOSS terms should be freely combinable to create new products. Compatibility is the attribute of software licenses that allows combining of program code. To be compatible, license terms must be free of contradictory or mutually exclusive requirements. ”

“ Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted (as in, for example, use of the Bison parser skeleton) . ”

“ The creators of free and open source software were able to use the fact that software is copyrighted, and that the right attaches automatically upon creation and fixation, to set up new, distributed methods of innovation. For example, free and open source software under the General Public License—such as Linux—is a "commons" to which all are granted access. Anyone may use the software without any restrictions. They are guaranteed access to the human-readable "source code," rather than just the inscrutable "machine code," so that they can understand, tinker, and modify. ”

“ For example, most open-source software licenses include provisions about distributing the software’s source code—but the CC licenses do not address this important aspect of sharing software. The software-sharing ecosystem is well established, and there are many good open-source software licenses to choose from. An FAQ from Creative Commons’ website available at https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software has more information about why we discourage the use of our licenses for software. ”

“ This is equally true for software that is commercialized and offered for a fee, and software that is made available without cost to others. While end-users often balk at overly restrictive software licenses, the uncertainty caused when no license is given can also discourage those wishing to make use of a piece of code. It is important to note that licenses can be used to facilitate access to software as well as restrict it. ”

“ We will protect our way of making software against those ways of making unfreedom. We will say only that the right to tinker has to be protected against hardware that resists it. I think that is both legitimately the scope of a free software license in everybody’s view, and also sufficient for the purpose. ”

“ Creative Commons licenses Although the GFDL extended open-content licensing principles outside the domain of software, the license remains tied to a specific context, namely, the licensing of software manuals and other texts. Many provisions of the GFDL, such as the references to “title pages,” “cover texts,” “invariant sections,” [123] are difficult to understand or to apply outside the context of literary works. ”

“ Every copy of the Program distributed by Hacktivismo (but not necessarily every other Author) consists of the Source Code accompanied, in some instances, by an ancillary distribution of compiled Object Code, but the continued availability of the Source Code from the Author addresses the possibility that You might have (for any reason) not received from someone else a complete, current, copy of the Source Code (lack of which would, for example, prevent You from exporting copies to others without violating this license, see Section 8) . ”

“ When you write a computer program, there is an enormous ecstatic result when it works. When you write a license, there’s an enormous ecstatic response when you think it might work, because you never really get rapid feedback. So for those of us who grew up with edit, compile, test, edit, compile, test, license making is more joy for less work, because you don’t have to test in the near term.
So there are a lot of guys out there who are very proud of licenses they have written which have not been in any sense, and I don’t mean only in a litigation sense, tested. ”

“ Textbooks, manuals and logos, diagrams and screenshots from GFDL software manuals that only use the GFDL license are still allowed. Files licensed with both GFDL and an accepted license like Creative Commons BY-SA are still allowed.
There is no time limit to move files from other projects to Commons. The licensing date is all that counts. It doesn't matter when the file was uploaded or created. Every wiki that allows local uploads should check if bots, scripts and templates that are used to move files to Commons need to be updated. Also update your local policy documentation if needed. ”

“ For a review of the drafting process that produced the GPLv3—a distributed, international endeavor conducted over the Internet—see Christopher M. DiLeo, Comment, “Bazaar” Transnational Drafting: An Analysis of the GNU Public License Version 3 Revision Process, 10 San Diego Int’l L.J. 193 (2008) . ”

“ The primary purpose of a proprietary software license is to limit the use of software according to the rights owner's business strategy. As a result, proprietary licenses are often very restrictive for end-users. They typically allow use of the software only for its stated purpose, often only on a single computer, forbid users from copying, redistributing, or altering the work, and specifically prohibit the creation of derivatives using parts of the work. ”

“ This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed—and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license as this one. ”

“ Any Licensees who release derivative works, as permitted by this License Agreement, are required to grant a royalty-free patent license of any patented technology.
Anyone Can Release Original Software Under The HESSLA: Although this License Agreement is drafted with Hacktivismo's objectives in mind, perhaps it will meet other authors' needs as well. ”

“ License text Many publishers are negligent or deliberately deceptive in reporting to their users the copyright status of materials in the public domain, or under a free license. One of the ways Wikimedia sets itself apart, in general, is by giving readers (and potential reusers) clear information about licensing. But in one respect, I think we fall short. At the bottom of every Wikisource page is the following text:
"Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ”

“ Inevitably, there are creators who apply a CC license to a work and then later decide they want to offer that work on different terms. Even though the original license cannot be revoked, the creator is free to also offer the work under a different license. Similarly, the creator is free to remove the copy of the work that they placed online. ”

“ Open-content licenses make such coordination lawful; they substitute for the hierarchical structure of a firm by allowing each contributor to the project to adapt and reuse code contributed by earlier contributors. Each FOSS work, in other words, is protected by not one copyright, but many: each contributor’s contributions are individually protected from the moment of fixation, but then licensed for free reuse by members of the public. ”

“ Permissive licenses are those that place the fewest restrictions on users and adopters, often only requiring that the original creators be attributed in any distribution or derivative of the software or source code. ”