On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Marcin Januchta wrote:
>
> You may find this question silly, but what/who is RMS and GPL?
Not a silly question at all.
RMS is Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
and the GNU (which stands for "GNU's Not Unix") project. For some obscure
reason, people who are often talked about end up being referred to by
their initials -- for example, RMS, ESR (Eric Raymond), SCC (Scott
Collins)... I guess it's a geek thing.
The GNU project website: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
The FSF website: http://www.fsf.org/fsf/fsf.html
RMS' website: http://www.stallman.org/
The software written by the GNU Project is a large part of what most
people refer to as "Linux".
The GPL is a license (the General Public License) developed by the FSF. It
is often called a "copyleft" license.
Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of
its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes
a means of keeping software free.
The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run
the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified
versions -- but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the
crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone
who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.
For an effective copyleft, modified versions must also be free. This
ensures that work based on ours becomes available to our community if it
is published. When programmers who have jobs as programmers volunteer to
improve GNU software, it is copyleft that prevents their employers from
saying, "You can't share those changes, because we are going to use them
to make our proprietary version of the program."
You can find out more about the GPL by reading the GPL FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html
HTH,
--
Ian Hickson )\ _. - ._.) fL
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