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The Free Software Foundation's birthday wishes for the GPL

By Alex Handy

February 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 2)
Twenty years on, the GNU Public License is the most popular free software license. And 25 years on, the GNU operating system has surpassed the old Unix world in popularity. The GNU operating system/Linux kernel combination has proved a powerful one-two punch, relegating all other 'nixes to the status of niche.

Today, the Linux kernel is the most well-known GPL-licensed project, but it's about to be joined by a completed OpenJDK, if the stars align this year. We asked software luminaries for their thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the GPL's creation and the 25th birthday of the GNU operating system.

Geir Magnusson Jr.
Apache Harmony Project lead and vice president of the Java Community Process at the Apache Foundation

Twenty years is a long time for anything in this industry, and the fact that the GPL is now this old is a testament to Richard Stallman's unique vision of "software freedom.”

The license has aged elegantly over the years, providing the foundation for, by some estimates, more than 50% of all free and open-source software. Its fundamental premise of compelling "share and share alike" has attracted a passionate, global community of developers and supporters, and much of the software that we take for granted today is under the GPL; the Linux operating system being the most notable example.

Recent updates to the license have made the GPL as modern as any other, keeping it relevant in an increasingly complicated IP environment. It will be interesting to see how the GPL continues to coexist with the less dogmatic, more permissive licenses such as the Apache License (to which I'm personally partial), and I look forward to seeing how the next 20 years unfolds for free and open-source software. It's going to be interesting.

Mark Shuttleworth
CEO and founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Second space tourist.

Future generations will come to depend heavily on a vast body of code and content that empowers all and yet is rigorously defensible in legal terms. The GPL was the pioneering effort that established the principles that underlie much of today's open and collaborative licensing: harnessing the global copyright system to establish a formal basis for copyleft and share-alike content. While the FSF is today part of a wider constellation of organizations, like the Creative Commons and the Software Freedom Law Center, it remains at the forefront of copyleft code licensing.

Related Search Term(s): GNU, GPL, Linux, open source, Unix, FSF, Sun

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GNU is Not Unix, but it is 25 In 1984, Richard Stallman began work on what would become the building blocks of the free software movement. Now, 25 years later, the GNU Project, including the General Public License and the gcc, has changed the way a generation of programmers behave.

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Comments

02/17/2009 05:32:06 AM EST

Thanks to the GPL License now we have more and better software, because when you share knowledge the social improve grows exponentially. Thanks to the people of the FSF, GNU, and those who continue making and licensing software under the GPL, but especially to Richard Stallman, who built their lead with a way to make a free society.

ColombiaDenis

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GNU is Not Unix, but it is 25
In 1984, Richard Stallman began work on what would become the building blocks of the free software movement. Now, 25 years later, the GNU Project, including the General Public License and the gcc, has changed the way a generation of programmers behave Read More...

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