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75-532: LRP was conceived and primarily developed by Dave Cinege from 1997 until 2002. It began originally as a 'router on a floppy' and evolved into a streamlined general purpose network operating system. As LRP is the oldest embedded Linux distribution, it formed (in whole or in part) the basis of many other embedded system distributions and commercial products which followed it. Several parts developed or specifically enhanced for LRP are still found in common usage today such as POSIXness and BusyBox . Dave Cinege worked on

150-678: A Balkanisation of the "Open Source Universe". Linus Torvalds, who decided not to adopt the GPLv3 for the Linux kernel, reiterated his criticism several years later. GPLv3 improved compatibility with several free software licenses such as the Apache License, version 2.0, and the GNU Affero General Public License, which GPLv2 could not be combined with. However, GPLv3 software could only be combined and share code with GPLv2 software if

225-601: A patent infringement claim or other litigation to impair users' freedom under the license. By 1990, it was becoming apparent that a less restrictive license would be strategically useful for the C library and for software libraries that essentially did the job of existing proprietary ones; when version 2 of the GPL (GPLv2) was released in June 1991, therefore, a second license – the GNU Library General Public License –

300-476: A symbolic link or hard link for each different name) in a specific manner with appropriate arguments. BusyBox benefits from the single binary approach, as it reduces the overhead introduced by the executable file format (typically ELF ), and it allows code to be shared between multiple applications without requiring a library . This technique is similar to what is provided by the crunchgen command in FreeBSD ,

375-452: A "user" and a "consumer product". It also explicitly removed the section on "Geographical Limitations", the probable removal of this section having been announced at the launch of the public consultation. The fourth discussion draft, which was the last, was released on 31 May 2007. It introduced Apache License version 2.0 compatibility (prior versions are incompatible), clarified the role of outside contractors, and made an exception to avoid

450-408: A US federal court ruled that an open-source license is an enforceable contract. In October 2021 SFC sued Vizio over breach of contract as an end user to request source code for Vizio's TVs, a federal judge has ruled in the interim that the GPL is an enforceable contract by end users as well as a license for copyright holders. The text of the GPL is itself copyrighted , and the copyright is held by

525-606: A complete bootable system on a single floppy disk that would serve both as a rescue disk and as an installer for the Debian distribution. Since that time, it has been extended to become the de facto standard core user space toolset for embedded Linux devices and Linux distribution installers. Since each Linux executable requires several kilobytes of overhead, having the BusyBox program combine over two hundred programs together often saves substantial disk space and system memory. BusyBox

600-425: A default judgement of triple damages of $ 90,000 and lawyers' costs and fees of $ 47,865, and possession of "presumably a lot of high-def TVs" as infringing equipment in the lawsuit Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al., the GPL infringement case noted in the paragraph above. No other developers, including original author Bruce Perens and maintainer Dave Cinege, were represented in these actions or party to

675-443: A licensee has no right to redistribute it, not even in modified form (barring fair use ), except under the terms of the license. One is only required to adhere to the terms of the GPL if one wishes to exercise rights normally restricted by copyright law, such as redistribution. Conversely, if one distributes copies of the work without abiding by the terms of the GPL (for instance, by keeping the source code secret), they can be sued by

750-456: A modified derivative of a GPL licensed content management system is not required to distribute its changes to the underlying software, because the modified web portal is not being redistributed but rather hosted, and also because the web portal output is also not a derivative work of the GPL licensed content management system. There has been debate on whether it is a violation of the GPLv1 to release

825-459: A new standard design outside of the POSIX specification. The stated purpose of this was to provide a modern standard base operating system suitable for any application including embedded systems, appliances, servers, and desktop computers. Cinege however stopped work several months later due to financial reasons. He refused to release any further work, or even the name of this OS, due to animosity towards

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900-534: A result of the controversies around GPLv3/GPLv2 discussions. At the end of 2011 it was relicensed under the BSD-2-Clause license after the project went dormant. In March 2013, it was relicensed again under the 0BSD license. On January 11, 2012, Tim Bird, a Sony employee, suggested creating an alternative to BusyBox which would not be under the GNU General Public License. He suggested it be based on

975-446: A version 4.0 rewrite of LRP from late 2000 into January 2001. He then began testing some ideas he had with proof of concept code, which he claimed was a radical departure from the status quo. To his surprise, this new direction seemed ideal, prompting him to abandon all work done on LRP 4.0 and begin from scratch on a new OS named LRP 5.0. LRP 5.0 development was headed towards a complete rewrite and reimplementation of Linux userland with

1050-418: Is allowed to charge a fee for this service or do this free of charge. This latter point distinguishes the GPL from software licenses that prohibit commercial redistribution. The FSF argues that free software should not place restrictions on commercial use, and the GPL explicitly states that GPL works may be sold at any price. The GPL additionally states that a distributor may not impose "further restrictions on

1125-449: Is applied to ensure that end users retain the freedoms defined above. However, software running as an application program under a GPL-licensed operating system such as Linux is not required to be licensed under GPL or to be distributed with source-code availability—the licensing depends only on the used libraries and software components and not on the underlying platform. For example, if a program consists only of original source code , or

1200-427: Is combined with source code from other software components , then the custom software components need not be licensed under GPL and need not make their source code available; even if the underlying operating system used is licensed under the GPL, applications running on it are not considered derivative works. Only if GPL licensed parts are used in a program (and the program is distributed), then all other source code of

1275-495: Is how the compiled code was available and there are "clear directions" on where to find the source code. The FSF does not hold the copyright for a work released under the GPL unless an author explicitly assigns copyrights to the FSF (which seldom happens except for programs that are part of the GNU project). Only the individual copyright holders have the authority to sue when a license violation

1350-500: Is prohibited by copyright law . The FSF argues that freedom-respecting free software should also not restrict commercial use and distribution (including redistribution): In purely private (or internal) use—with no sales and no distribution—the software code may be modified and parts reused without requiring the source code to be released. For sales or distribution, the entire source code needs to be made available to end users, including any code changes and additions—in that case, copyleft

1425-499: Is suspected. Software under the GPL may be run for all purposes, including commercial purposes and even as a tool for creating proprietary software , such as when using GPL-licensed compilers . Users or companies who distribute GPL-licensed works (e.g. software), may charge a fee for copies or give them free of charge. This distinguishes the GPL from shareware software licenses that allow copying for personal use but prohibit commercial distribution or proprietary licenses where copying

1500-691: The ASP loophole in the GPL . As there were concerns expressed about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement, it was decided to keep the GPL and the AGPL license separated. Others, notably some high-profile Linux kernel developers such as Linus Torvalds , Greg Kroah-Hartman , and Andrew Morton , commented to the mass media and made public statements about their objections to parts of discussion drafts 1 and 2. The kernel developers referred to GPLv3 draft clauses regarding DRM / Tivoization , patents, and "additional restrictions", and warned of

1575-499: The AGPL (v1) , and patent deals between Microsoft and distributors of free and open-source software, which some viewed as an attempt to use patents as a weapon against the free software community. Version 3 was developed as an attempt to address these concerns and was officially released on 29 June 2007. Version 1 of the GNU GPL, released on 25 February 1989, was written to protect against

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1650-481: The Software Freedom Law Center . According to Stallman, the most important changes were in relation to software patents , free software license compatibility, the definition of "source code", and hardware restrictions on software modifications, such as tivoization . Other changes related to internationalization, how license violations are handled, and how additional permissions could be granted by

1725-546: The WIPO Copyright Treaty , and that those who convey the work waive all legal power to prohibit circumvention of the technical protection measure "to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work". This means that users cannot be held liable for circumventing DRM implemented using GPLv3-licensed code under laws such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The distribution rights granted by

1800-493: The BusyBox project decided against adopting the GNU General Public License Version 3 ( GPLv3 ); the BusyBox license was clarified as being GPL-2.0-only . Since October 2006, Denys Vlasenko has taken over maintainership of BusyBox from Rob Landley, who has started Toybox , also as a result of the license controversies. In late 2007, BusyBox also came to prominence for actively prosecuting violations of

1875-411: The BusyBox executable: More commonly, the desired command names are linked (using hard or symbolic links) to the BusyBox executable; BusyBox reads argv[0] to find the name by which it is called, and runs the appropriate command, for example just after /bin/ls is linked to /bin/busybox . This works because the first argument passed to a program is the name used for the program call, in this case

1950-634: The Free Software Foundation. The FSF permits people to create new licenses based on the GPL, as long as the derived licenses do not use the GPL preamble without permission. This is discouraged, however, since such a license might be incompatible with the GPL and causes a perceived license proliferation . Other licenses created by the GNU project include the GNU Lesser General Public License , GNU Free Documentation License , and GNU Affero General Public License . The text of

2025-580: The GNU project. It was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs (1985), the GNU Debugger , and the GNU C Compiler . These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program, rendering them incompatible, despite being the same license. Stallman's goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible for many projects to share code. The second version of

2100-404: The GPL for modified versions of the work are not unconditional. When someone distributes a GPL licensed work plus their own modifications, the requirements for distributing the whole work cannot be any greater than the requirements that are in the GPL. This requirement is known as copyleft. It earns its legal power from the use of copyright on software programs. Because a GPL work is copyrighted,

2175-523: The GPL include the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). David A. Wheeler argues that the copyleft provided by the GPL was crucial to the success of Linux -based systems, giving the programmers who contributed to the kernel assurance that their work would benefit the whole world and remain free, rather than being exploited by software companies that would not have to give anything back to

2250-517: The GPL is not itself under the GPL. The license's copyright disallows modification of the license. Copying and distributing the license is allowed since the GPL requires recipients to get "a copy of this License along with the Program". According to the GPL FAQ, anyone can make a new license using a modified version of the GPL as long as they use a different name for the license, do not mention "GNU", and remove

2325-431: The GPL licensed program, they may still use the software within their organization however they like, and works (including programs) constructed by the use of the program are not required to be covered by this license. Software developer Allison Randal argued that the GPLv3 as a license is unnecessarily confusing for lay readers, and could be simplified while retaining the same conditions and legal force. In April 2017,

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2400-513: The GPLv2 license used had the optional "or later" clause and the software was upgraded to GPLv3. While the "GPLv2 or any later version" clause is considered by FSF as the most common form of licensing GPLv2 software, Toybox developer Rob Landley described it as a lifeboat clause . Software projects licensed with the optional "or later" clause include the GNU Project , while a prominent example without

2475-589: The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). The license includes instructions to specify "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" to allow the flexible optional use of either version 2 or 3, but some developers change this to specify "version 2" only. In late 2005, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced work on version 3 of the GPL (GPLv3). On 16 January 2006,

2550-561: The Super Micro case being settled on July 23, 2008. BusyBox and Bell Microproducts also settled out of court on October 17. On December 14, 2009, a new lawsuit was filed naming fourteen defendants including Best Buy , JVC , Samsung and others. In February 2010 Samsung released its LN52A650 TV firmware under GPLv2, which was used later as a reference by the SamyGO community project. On about August 3, 2010, BusyBox won from Westinghouse

2625-459: The argument would be "/bin/ls". BusyBox would see that its "name" is "ls" and act like the "ls" program. BusyBox is used by several operating systems running on embedded systems and is an essential component of distributions such as OpenWrt , OpenEmbedded (including the Yocto Project ) and Buildroot . The Sharp Zaurus utilizes BusyBox extensively for ordinary Unix-like tasks performed on

2700-429: The clause is the Linux kernel. The final version of the license text was published on 29 June 2007. The terms and conditions of the GPL must be made available to anybody receiving a copy of a work that has a GPL applied to it ("the licensee"). Any licensee who adheres to the terms and conditions is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version. The licensee

2775-438: The community. In 2007, the third version of the license (GPLv3) was released to address some perceived problems with the second version (GPLv2) which were discovered during the latter's long-time usage. To keep the license current, the GPL license includes an optional "any later version" clause, allowing users to choose between the original terms or the terms in new versions as updated by the FSF. Software projects licensed with

2850-488: The computer industry and what he perceived as the plundering of open source authors' work by large corporations. On May 6, 2003 Cinege updated the LRP website to reflect that the project was being abandoned. BusyBox BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file . It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux , Android , and FreeBSD , although many of

2925-470: The copyright holder. The concept of "software propagation", as a term for the copying and duplication of software, was explicitly defined. The public consultation process was coordinated by the Free Software Foundation with assistance from Software Freedom Law Center, Free Software Foundation Europe , and other free software groups. Comments were collected from the public via the gplv3.fsf.org web portal, using purpose-written software called stet . During

3000-511: The corresponding full versions of the utilities replaced by BusyBox. Research that compared GNU , BusyBox, asmutils and Perl implementations of the standard Unix commands showed that in some situations BusyBox may perform faster than other implementations, but not always. The official BusyBox documentation lists an overview of the available commands and their command-line options. List of BusyBox commands Programs included in BusyBox can be run simply by adding their name as an argument to

3075-407: The difference being that BusyBox provides simplified versions of the utilities (for example, an ls command without file sorting ability), while a crunchgen generated sum of all the utilities would offer the fully functional versions. Sharing of the common code, along with routines written with size-optimization in mind, can make a BusyBox system use much less storage space than a system built with

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3150-475: The dormant Toybox. In January 2012 the proposal of creating a BSD licensed alternative to the GPL licensed BusyBox project drew harsh criticism from Matthew Garrett for taking away the only relevant tool for copyright enforcement of the Software Freedom Conservancy group. The starter of BusyBox based lawsuits, Rob Landley, responded that this was intentional as he came to the conclusion that

3225-399: The first "discussion draft" of GPLv3 was published, and the public consultation began. The public consultation was originally planned for nine to fifteen months, but ultimately lasted eighteen months, with four drafts being published. The official GPLv3 was released by the FSF on 29 June 2007. GPLv3 was written by Richard Stallman, with legal counsel from Eben Moglen and Richard Fontana from

3300-450: The latter-day systemd ) using itself to be called as init on startup and mdev at hotplug time. The BusyBox website provides a full list of the utilities implemented. Typical computer programs have a separate binary ( executable ) file for each application. BusyBox is a single binary, which is a conglomerate of many applications, each of which can be accessed by calling the single BusyBox binary with various names (supported by having

3375-407: The lawsuits resulted not in the hoped for positive outcomes and he wanted to stop them "in whatever way I see fit" . GNU General Public License#Version 3 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, and modify the software. The GPL

3450-536: The legal distinction between a license and a contract is an important one: contracts are enforceable by contract law , whereas licenses are enforced under copyright law . However, this distinction is not useful in the many jurisdictions where there are no differences between contracts and licenses, such as civil law systems. Those who do not accept the GPL's terms and conditions do not have permission, under copyright law, to copy or distribute GPL-licensed software or derivative works. However, if they do not redistribute

3525-450: The license, version 2, was released in 1991. Over the following 15 years, members of the free software community became concerned over problems in the GPLv2 license that could let someone exploit GPL-licensed software in ways contrary to the license's intent. These problems included tivoization (the inclusion of GPL-licensed software in hardware that refuses to run modified versions of its software), compatibility issues similar to those of

3600-420: The license. Copyleft applies only when a person seeks to redistribute the program. Developers may make private modified versions with no obligation to divulge the modifications, as long as they do not distribute the modified software to anyone else. Copyleft applies only to the software, and not to its output (unless that output is itself a derivative work of the program). For example, a public web portal running

3675-431: The major change in GPLv2 was the "Liberty or Death" clause, as he calls it – Section 7. The section says that licensees may distribute a GPL-covered work only if they can satisfy all of the license's obligations, despite any other legal obligations they might have. In other words, the obligations of the license may not be severed due to conflicting obligations. This provision is intended to discourage any party from using

3750-464: The optional "or later" clause include the GNU Project, while projects like the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 only. The "or any later version" clause is sometimes known as a "lifeboat clause" since it allows combinations between different versions of GPL-licensed software to maintain compatibility. The original GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, for use with programs released as part of

3825-453: The original author under copyright law. Copyright law has historically been used to prevent distribution of work by parties not authorized by the creator. Copyleft uses the same copyright laws to accomplish a very different goal. It grants rights to distribution to all parties insofar as they provide the same rights to subsequent ones, and they to the next, etc. In this way, the GPL and other copyleft licenses attempt to enforce libre access to

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3900-509: The parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license   ... This aimed to make such future deals ineffective. The license was also meant to cause Microsoft to extend the patent licenses it granted to Novell customers for the use of GPLv3 software to all users of that GPLv3 software; this was possible only if Microsoft was legally a "conveyor" of the GPLv3 software. Early drafts of GPLv3 also let licensors add an AGPL -like requirement that would have plugged

3975-452: The perceived problems of a Microsoft–Novell style agreement, saying in Section 11 paragraph 6 that: You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of

4050-409: The preamble, though the preamble can be used in a modified license if permission to use it is obtained from the Free Software Foundation (FSF). According to the FSF, "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." However, if one releases a GPL-licensed entity to the public, there

4125-522: The program needs to be made available under the same license terms. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) was created to have a weaker copyleft than the GPL, in that it does not require custom-developed source code (distinct from the LGPL licensed parts) to be made available under the same license terms. The fifth section of version 3 states that no GPL-licensed code shall be considered an effective "technical protection measure" as defined by Article 11 of

4200-467: The project and became the official maintainer between December 1999 and March 2006. During this time the Linux embedded marketplace exploded in growth, and BusyBox matured greatly, expanding both its user base and functionality. Rob Landley became the maintainer in 2005 until late 2006, then Denys Vlasenko took over as the current maintainer. In September 2006, after heavy discussions and controversies between project maintainer Rob Landley and Bruce Perens ,

4275-420: The public consultation process, 962 comments were submitted for the first draft. By the end of the comment period, a total of 2,636 comments had been submitted. The third draft was released on 28 March 2007. This draft included language intended to prevent patent-related agreements such as the controversial Microsoft-Novell patent agreement , and restricted the anti-tivoization clauses to a legal definition of

4350-426: The rights granted by the GPL". This forbids activities such as distributing the software under a non-disclosure agreement or contract. The fourth section for version 2 of the license and the seventh section of version 3 require that programs distributed as pre-compiled binaries be accompanied by a copy of the source code, a written offer to distribute the source code via the same mechanism as the pre-compiled binary, or

4425-488: The same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD , MIT , and Apache . Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software (FOSS) domain. Prominent free software programs licensed under

4500-434: The settlements. On December 15, 2009, Perens released a statement expressing his unhappiness with some aspects of the legal situation, and in particular alleged that the current BusyBox developers "appear to have removed some of the copyright statements of other BusyBox developers, and appear to have altered license statements". BusyBox can be customized to provide a subset of over two hundred utilities. It can provide most of

4575-440: The source code in obfuscated form, such as in cases in which the author is less willing to make the source code available. The consensus was that while unethical, it was not considered a violation. The issue was clarified when the license was altered with v2 to require that the "preferred" version of the source code be made available. The GPL was designed as a license , rather than a contract. In some common law jurisdictions,

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4650-481: The system's shell. BusyBox is also an essential component of VMware ESXi , Tiny Core Linux , SliTaz 5(Rolling), and Alpine Linux , all of which are not embedded distributions. It is necessary for several root applications on Android and is also preinstalled with some "1 Tap Root" solutions such as Kingo Root . Toybox was started early 2006 under the GPL-2.0-only license by former BusyBox maintainer Rob Landley as

4725-417: The terms of GPLv1 could be combined with software under more permissive terms, as this would not change the terms under which the whole could be distributed. However, software distributed under GPLv1 could not be combined with software distributed under a more restrictive license, as this would conflict with the requirement that the whole be distributable under the terms of GPLv1. According to Richard Stallman,

4800-603: The terms of its license (the GPL) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York . What was claimed to be the first US lawsuit over a GPL violation concerned use of BusyBox in an embedded device . The lawsuit, case 07-CV-8205, was filed on September 20, 2007, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of Andersen and Landley against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., after BusyBox code

4875-682: The tools it provides are designed to work with interfaces provided by the Linux kernel . It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux ", as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 , after controversially deciding not to move to version 3 . Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1995 and declared complete for his intended usage in 1996, BusyBox initially aimed to put

4950-446: The two main methods by which software distributors restricted the freedoms that define free software. The first problem was that distributors might publish only binary files that are executable, but not readable or modifiable by humans. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that copying and distributing copies of any portion of the program must also make the human-readable source code available under the same licensing terms. The second problem

5025-519: The utilities specified in the Single Unix Specification (SUS) plus many others that a user would expect to see on a Linux system. BusyBox uses the Almquist shell , also known as A Shell, ash and sh. An alternative for customization is the smaller 'hush' shell. "Msh" and "lash" used to be available. As it is a complete bootstrap system, it will further replace the init daemon and udev (or

5100-510: The work and all derivatives. Many distributors of GPL licensed programs bundle the source code with the executables . An alternative method of satisfying the copyleft is to provide a written offer to provide the source code on a physical medium (such as a CD) upon request. In practice, many GPL licensed programs are distributed over the Internet, and the source code is made available over FTP or HTTP . For Internet distribution, this complies with

5175-510: The written offer to obtain the source code that the user got when they received the pre-compiled binary under the GPL. The second section of version 2 and the fifth section of version 3 also require giving "all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program". Version 3 of the license allows making the source code available in additional ways in fulfillment of the seventh section. These include downloading source code from an adjacent network server or by peer-to-peer transmission, provided that

5250-603: Was discovered in a firmware upgrade and attempts to contact the company had apparently failed. The case was settled with release of the Monsoon version of the source and payment of an undisclosed amount of money to Andersen and Landley. On November 21, 2007, the SFLC brought two similar lawsuits on behalf of Andersen and Landley against two more companies, Xterasys (case 07-CV-10455) and High-Gain Antennas (case 07-CV-10456). The Xterasys case

5325-439: Was introduced at the same time and numbered with version 2 to show that both were complementary. The version numbers diverged in 1999 when version 2.1 of the LGPL was released, which renamed it the GNU Lesser General Public License to reflect its place in the philosophy. The GPLv2 was also modified to refer to the new name of the LGPL, but its version number remained the same, resulting in the original GPLv2 not being recognised by

5400-534: Was maintained by Enrique Zanardi and focused on the needs of the Debian boot-floppies installer system until early 1998, when Dave Cinege took it over for the Linux Router Project (LRP). Cinege made several additions, created a modularized build environment, and shifted BusyBox's focus into general high-level embedded systems . As LRP development slowed down in 1999, Erik Andersen, then of Lineo, Inc. , took over

5475-707: Was settled on December 17 for release of source code used and an undisclosed payment, and the High-Gain Antennas case on March 6, 2008, for active license compliance and an undisclosed payment. On December 7, 2007, a case was brought against Verizon Communications over its distribution of firmware for Actiontec routers; this case was settled March 17, 2008 on condition of license compliance, appointment of an officer to oversee future compliance with free software licenses, and payment of an undisclosed sum. Further suits were brought on June 9, 2008, against Bell Microproducts (case 08-CV-5270) and SuperMicro (case 08-CV-5269),

5550-426: Was that distributors might add restrictions, either to the license or by combining the software with other software that had other restrictions on distribution. The union of two sets of restrictions would apply to the combined work, thus adding unacceptable constrictions. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that modified versions, as a whole, had to be distributed under the terms of GPLv1. Therefore, software distributed under

5625-469: Was the first copyleft license for general use. It was originally written by Richard Stallman , the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project . The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition . The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under

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