The Gnu General Public License

The GNU General Public License

The GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) General Public License (GNU GPL) has had a significant role in defining and protecting free software (signifying software freedoms and not price) for over 20 years. To understand its influence and relevance it is necessary to know its history, content, and current role in software distribution and creation.

To understand the significance of the GNU GPL’s history, it is important to identify Richard Stallman, his free software movement, and how the GNU project was started. Richard Stallman, who is an American software freedom activist, computer programmer, and original President of the Free Software Foundation, has been the leading influence behind the development of the GNU GPL. Stallman was a programmer and student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he began forming his philosophy and goals for the free software movement. In 1983 Stallman founded the movement by launching the GNU project. The GNU project is a mass collaboration project to develop an operating system based on free software and without any proprietary software. Free software was later defined as referring to freedoms and not monetary value. The primary freedoms that have been connected to free software include the freedom to run a program for any purpose, the freedom to study how a program works, the freedom to redistribute copies, and the freedom to improve a program and release the modified version to the public. Stallman was responsible for programming a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator for the GNU operating system. For each of these programs Stallman wrote a different software license to protect their freedoms. In 1991 Linus Torvalds used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel resulting in a fully functional operating system based on free software (Williams, 2010).

Intro sentence: The content of the GNU GPL has been updated and modified over the years which has resulted in...