The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project.
The GPL is the most popular of the strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft
GNU is used in about 70% of all free software projects. Although GPL licence is free it also strogly emphasises the initial authors rights to determine the faith of the created works - the pieces created by the GPL licence can be used, copied, distributed, modified for any purpose as long as the it is distributed under the same conditions - the next user of the piece can have the same rights and must obey these same GPL conditions. Therefore its not possible to make GPL licenced software into a proprietary piece.
Under this philosophy, the GPL grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition 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, of which the BSD licenses are the standard examples. BSD licence allows to make commercial and business versions based on the BSD software.
The GPL requires any derivative work that is released to be released according to the GPL while the BSD licence does not. BSD´s only requirement is to acknowledge the original authors, and poses no restrictions on how the source code may be used.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment