Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search - Software License

Software License

Although the GIMPS software's source code is publicly available, technically it is not free software, since it has a restriction that users must abide by the project's distribution terms if the software is used to discover a prime number with at least 100 million decimal digits and wins the $150,000 USD bounty offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Third-party programs for testing Mersenne numbers, such as Mlucas and Glucas (for non-x86 systems), do not have this restriction.

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