GNU General Public License

“ 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. ”

“ A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as free software—witness the case of the BSD utilities—but putting a program under the GPL sent a definite message. "I think the very existence of the GPL inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux development team. A few years after the release of the GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. ”

“ Lunch: What Every Developer Should Know About Open Source Licensing, Queue, May 2004, at 41, 42 (“GPL partisans like to call it a ‘protective license’ because it ensures that code covered by it will remain open source forever.”) ; Chris Maxcer, Free Software Licensing, Part 2: Beyond GPL, Linux Insider, July 27, 2007, http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/58530.html (“Basically, though, GPL v2 and v3’s key point is to make the code ‘free forever.’ ”) . ↑ See FSF, GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 3 (2007) , available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html [hereinafter LGPLv3] . ”

“ Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of Emacs to emerge. To close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free software colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to modify GNU Emacs just so long as they published their modifications. In addition, the resulting "derivative" works would also have to carry the same GNU Emacs License. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Particularly if a software licensor has sufficient market power to be deemed a monopoly, or if certain proposed expansions of the law of software licensing, masquerading as "codifications," are widely adopted, the ability of a private entity to impose legal prohibitions and duties on virtually everyone else as though the licensor has assumed powers that customarily belong to legislative bodies is both breathtaking and deeply troubling. Of course, we are hardly the first to distribute software under a license agreement that imposes conditions on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. ”

“ Freedom of use: Commercial and noncommercial use without notification is directly expressed. Mandatory attribution to the author and rights holder translates into incentives for both authors and their sponsors. The license automatically applies to virtually all derivatives from GPL-licensed work, which ensures advantages to the public and right holders. The following are the limitations of the license: It is limited to software production only. It is based primarily on copyright law, although it acknowledges possible interference with other laws, mostly patent laws. ”

“ Absent preventive action, however, termination problems may substantially complicate open-content projects in the future.
The natural inclination for open-content advocates would surely be to seek to solve the problem through skillful redrafting of the governing licensing instruments. The CC0 license, while not without flaws, reflects the best recent thinking in this regard; it recognizes its own potential infirmity under existing law and supplies an alternative means to effectuate the licensor’s intent. ”

“ It is not the purpose of this Section 13 to induce You to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this Section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the software distribution system reflected in this License Agreement, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through related distribution systems, in reliance on consistent application of such distribution systems ”

“ 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. ”

“ To add a final layer of complexity, different versions of each Creative Commons license exist that are tailored to the particularities of different national legal systems, and where a particular jurisdiction’s version of the license applies, it is common to so note. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Licenses may have other benefits for consumers: many licenses permit users to make extra copies, to use the software on multiple computers, even to incorporate the software into the user's products. But whether a particular license is generous or restrictive, a simple two-party contract is not "equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright" and therefore may be enforced. ”

“ This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of dual licensing: a prospective licensee dissatisfied with some of the conditions of an open-content license may negotiate with the work’s author for a license on different terms. [31] Absent dual licensing, however, a licensee who is willing to observe the conditions stated in an open-content license is free to use the work without the particularized approval of (and indeed, without notice to) the licensor. ”

“ Questions The license on licenses A bit of a confusing concept, but if you have a text on a license, would the text be under copyright or licensed under the license it describes? For instance, Nupedia Open Content License has no indication of its copyright. Would it follow the basic copyright or the NOCL licensing? Another example would be the GNU Free Documentation License. ”

“ The licenses might first be characterized according to the constraining force they exert on downstream users of the licensed works. The BSD license is minimally constraining; beyond the obligations to recognize the original author’s copyright and to refrain from implying endorsement or pro- motion, the license places no limitations on a user’s copying, modification, or distribution of the work, including for profit. [89] At the opposite extreme, the GPL is maximally constraining, regulating not only how a work may be reused, but also how derivatives of the work may be licensed. ”

“ Institutions receiving public funds will typically license proprietary software to other academic or non-profit users at no charge but require a fee for licensing to for-profit and industry users.
Applying a License to Your Software
Once you have chosen a license strategy for your software, the usual first step in applying it is to contact your institutional TTO. Although many FOSS licenses are easy to apply even by the non-legal-expert, as researchers and academics it is unlikely you personally own all of the rights to your work. ”

“ Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection—even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.1
In an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the GPL has become the proverbial "big stick." Even companies that once laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The methodology is to exchange the Author's permission to copy, change, and/or distribute a copyrighted work, for every Licensee's acceptance of terms and conditions that promote the licensor's objectives. In both this License Agreement and the GPL, the terms and conditions that each Licensee must accept are intended to discriminate against certain very narrow, limited kinds of human endeavor, that are inconsistent with the licensor's political objectives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”