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General Public License

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General Public License
POS/355 Professor Fischer
Jaquetta Meyers

General Public License
POS/355 Professor Fischer
Jaquetta Meyers

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The GNU or the General Public License was created by Richard Stallman in 1989. The program was started in 1984 to develop operating systems that were similar to UNIX. He thought in order to protect software from being made proprietary; it was he who made it a derivative of copyright law that serves “the opposite of its usual purpose”. ("Gnu General Public License (Gnu GPL or Simply GPL", 2008) The General Public License abbreviations can be GNU or GPL. GPL states that programmers can copy and distribute copies of a software program’s source code, under the condition that each copy displays a copyright notice. The GPL also deals with the modification and redistribution of software in which it requires the same conditions as well as notification of any changes made to the software. The GPL is under copyright ownership of the FSF which is a tax-exempt charity to generate funding for the software. The GPL was created to set forth principles of the founding of the project and FSF. The FSF is when a particular user has software freedom. They have freedom to run any program for any purpose, they can study the program to see how the program works and make changes if needed. The third freedom that is allowed by the user is the freedom to redistribute copies and finally they can distribute copies of changes made by others.

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GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL. (2008). Retrieved from http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/definition/General-Public-License

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