The GPL Summarized

by me from a recent comment of mine.

OK. If you insist on copyright, I’ll use my legal privileges granted by copyright law to prevent the use of almost all of those privileges by me or anyone else. I’ll only insist that my work must be attributed to me, and that my work, even if mixed in with the work of others, must always be distributed under exactly the same terms that I distributed it.

Two of the privileges included in "almost all" are the exclusive privilege of creating and distributing verbatim copies of my work, and the exclusive privilege of creating and distributing derivative works derived from my work. Of course, "my work," if that work is software compiled from source code, refers primarily to the source code, but also to the compiled object code.

#copyright #gpl #free-software #open-culture #proprietary-software #freedom #liberty #unfree-software