History
The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989 for use with programs released as part of the GNU project. The original GPL was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs, 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.
As of August 2007, the GPL accounted for nearly 65% of the 43,442 free software projects listed on Freshmeat, and as of January 2006, about 68% of the projects listed on SourceForge.net. Similarly, a 2001 survey of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that 50% of the source code was licensed under the GPL and a 1997 survey of MetaLab, then the largest free software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the software licensed therein. Prominent free software programs licensed under the GPL include the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Some other free software programs (MySQL is a prominent example) are dual-licensed under multiple licenses, often with one of the licenses being the GPL.
It is believed that the copyleft provided by the GPL was crucial to the success of Linux based systems, giving the programmers who contributed to the kernel the 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 the community.
The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991. Over the following 15 years, members of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community became concerned over problems in the GPLv2 license which allowed GPL-licensed software to be exploited in ways that were contrary to the intentions of the license. These problems included tivoization (the inclusion of GPL-licensed software in hardware that will refuse to run modified versions of its software); incompatibility issues like with the Affero General Public License; and patent deals between Microsoft and distributors of free and open source software which was viewed as an attempt to use patents as a weapon against the FOSS community.
Version 3 was developed to attempt to address these concerns. It was officially released on 29 June 2007.
Read more about this topic: GNU General Public License
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