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Copyright, licenses, and stewardship
The GNU Project suggests contributors assign the
copyright for GNU packages to the Free Software Foundation, although
this is not required.
Copyright law grants the copyright-holder significant control over
the copying and distributing of a work, but FSF wrote a license for
the GNU software which grant recipients permission to copy and
redistribute the software under highly permissive terms. For most of
the 80s, each GNU package had its own license: the Emacs General
Public License, the GCC General Public License, et cetera. In 1989,
FSF published a single license they could use for all their
software, and which could be used by non-GNU projects: the GNU
General Public License (GPL).
This license is now used by most GNU programs, as well as a large
number of free software programs that are not part of the GNU
project; it is the most commonly used free software license. It
gives all recipients of a program the right to run, copy, modify and
distribute it, while forbidding them from imposing further
restrictions on any copies they distribute. This idea is often
referred to as copyleft.
In 1991, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), then known as
the Library General Public License, was written for certain
libraries. 1991 also saw the release of version 2 of the GNU GPL.
The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), for documentation,
followed in 2000. The GPL and LGPL were revised to version 3 in
2007, improving their international applicability, and adding
protection for users whose hardware restricts software changes.
Most GNU software is distributed under the GPL. A minority is
distributed under the LGPL, and a handful of packages are
distributed under permissive free software licences.
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