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The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL, or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, or modify the software. [7] The GPL was the first copyleft license available for general use.
A GNU license or GNU General Public License , is a series of widely-used free software licenses that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software. Version 1 was released 25 February 1989 by Richard Stallman and its last version (3) was published on 29 June 2007. Meanwhile it has originated other derivations to ...
By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it.
In 1991, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), then known as the Library General Public License, was written for the GNU C Library to allow it to be linked with proprietary software. [66] 1991 also saw the release of version 2 of the GNU GPL. The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation, followed in 2000. [67]
[14] [65] The term became associated with the FSF's later reciprocal licenses, notably the GNU General Public License (GPL). [66] Traditional, proprietary software licenses are written with the goal of increasing profit, but Stallman wrote the GPL to increase the body of available free software. His reciprocal licenses offer the rights to use ...
The following table compares various features of each license and is a general guide to the terms and conditions of each license, based on seven subjects or categories. Recent tools like the European Commissions' Joinup Licensing Assistant, [ 10 ] makes possible the licenses selection and comparison based on more than 40 subjects or categories ...
The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft. An even stronger copyleft license is the AGPL , which requires the publishing of the source code for software as a service use cases.
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components.