GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License GNU GPL or GPL is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software6 The license was originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation FSF for the GNU Project, and grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition7 The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely used examples GPL was the first copyleft license for general use
Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software domain68910111213 Prominent free software programs licensed under the GPL include the Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection GCC David A Wheeler argues that the copyleft provided by the GPL was crucial to the success of Linux-based systems, giving the programmers who contribugnu general public license, gnu general public license version 2, gnu general public license (gpl), gnu general public license download, gnu general public license explained, gnu general public license software GNU General Public License