Together with our colleagues at LinkedIn, we are happy to announce that Feathr feature store is joining the LF AI & Data Foundation, an umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation supporting open source innovation in artificial intelligence and data.
Microsoft Must Open Source Windows 7, Free Software Foundation Says
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software.[7] The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition.[8] These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software domain.[7][9][10][11][12] 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 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.[13]
The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991. Over the following 15 years, members of the free software community became concerned over problems in the GPLv2 license that could let someone exploit GPL-licensed software in ways contrary to the license's intent.[20] These problems included tivoization (the inclusion of GPL-licensed software in hardware that refuses to run modified versions of its software), compatibility issues similar to those of the Affero General Public License, and patent deals between Microsoft and distributors of free and open-source software, which some viewed as an attempt to use patents as a weapon against the free software community.
According to Stallman, the most important changes were in relation to software patents, free software license compatibility, the definition of "source code", and hardware restrictions on software modifications, such as tivoization.[27][29] Other changes related to internationalization, how license violations are handled, and how additional permissions could be granted by the copyright holder. The concept of "software propagation", as a term for the copying and duplication of software, was explicitly defined.
The terms and conditions of the GPL must be made available to anybody receiving a copy of the work that has a GPL applied to it ("the licensee"). Any licensee who adheres to the terms and conditions is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version. The licensee is allowed to charge a fee for this service or do this free of charge. This latter point distinguishes the GPL from software licenses that prohibit commercial redistribution. The FSF argues that free software should not place restrictions on commercial use,[49] and the GPL explicitly states that GPL works may be sold at any price.
On 20 July 2021, the developers of the open-source Stockfish chess engine sued ChessBase, the creator of chess software, for violating the GPLv3 license.[94] It was claimed that Chessbase had made only slight modifications to the Stockfish code and sold the new engines (Fat Fritz 2 and Houdini 6) to their customers.[95] Additionally, Fat Fritz 2 was marketed as if it was an innovative engine. ChessBase had infringed on the license by not distributing these products as Free Software in accordance with the GPL.
David A. Wheeler has advocated that free/open source software developers use only GPL-compatible licenses, because doing otherwise makes it difficult for others to participate and contribute code.[109] As a specific example of license incompatibility, Sun Microsystems' ZFS cannot be included in the GPL-licensed Linux kernel, because it is licensed under the GPL-incompatible Common Development and Distribution License. Furthermore, ZFS is protected by patents, so distributing an independently developed GPL-ed implementation would still require Oracle's permission.[110]
It is possible to use the GPL for text documents instead of computer programs, or more generally for all kinds of media, if it is clear what constitutes the source code (defined as "the preferred form of the work for making changes in it").[111] For manuals and textbooks, though, the FSF recommends the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) instead, which it created for this purpose.[112] Nevertheless, the Debian developers recommended (in a resolution adopted in 2006) to license documentation for their project under the GPL, because of the incompatibility of the GFDL with the GPL (text licensed under the GFDL cannot be incorporated into GPL software).[113][114] Also, the FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007.[115]
A 1997 survey of MetaLab, then the largest free software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the software licensed therein.[117] Similarly, a 2000 survey of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that 53% of the source code was licensed under the GPL.[9] As of 2003[update], about 68% of all projects and 82.1% of the open source industry certified licensed projects listed on SourceForge.net were from the GPL license family.[119] As of August 2008[update], the GPL family accounted for 70.9% of the 44,927 free software projects listed on Freecode.[10]
After the release of the GPLv3 in June 2007, adoption of this new GPL version was much discussed[120] and some projects decided against upgrading. For instance the Linux kernel,[14][43] MySQL,[121] BusyBox,[122] AdvFS,[123] Blender,[124][125] VLC media player,[126] and MediaWiki[127] decided against adopting GPLv3.On the other hand, in 2009, two years after the release of GPLv3, Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona reported that the number of open-source project licensed software that had moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3 was 50%, counting the projects hosted at Google Code.[11]
In August 2013, according to Black Duck Software, the website's data shows that the GPL license family is used by 54% of open-source projects, with a breakdown of the individual licenses shown in the following table.[118] However, a later study in 2013 showed that software licensed under the GPL license family has increased, and that even the data from Black Duck Software has shown a total increase of software projects licensed under GPL. The study used public information gathered from repositories of the Debian Project, and the study criticized Black Duck Software for not publishing their methodology used in collecting statistics.[134] Daniel German, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria in Canada, presented a talk in 2013 about the methodological challenges in determining which are the most widely used free software licenses, and showed how he could not replicate the result from Black Duck Software.[135]
There is a distinction between an app store, which sells DRM-restricted software under proprietary licenses, and the more general concept of digital distribution via some form of online software repository. Virtually all modern Unix systems and Linux distributions have application repositories, including NetBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian. These specific application repositories all contain GPL-licensed software apps, in some cases even when the core project does not permit GPL-licensed code in the base system (for instance OpenBSD[145]). In other cases, such as the Ubuntu App Store, proprietary commercial software applications and GPL-licensed applications are both available via the same system; the reason that the Mac App Store (and similar projects) is incompatible with GPL-licensed apps is not inherent in the concept of an app store, but is rather specifically due to Apple's terms-of-use requirement[144] that all apps in the store utilize Apple DRM restrictions. Ubuntu's app store does not demand any such requirement: "These terms do not limit or restrict your rights under any applicable open source software licenses."[146]
In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".[147][148] In response to Microsoft's attacks on the GPL, several prominent Free Software developers and advocates released a joint statement supporting the license.[149] Microsoft has released Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, which contains GPL-licensed code. In July 2009, Microsoft itself released a body of around 20,000 lines of Linux driver code under the GPL.[150] The Hyper-V code that is part of the submitted code used open-source components licensed under the GPL and was originally statically linked to proprietary binary parts, the latter being inadmissible in GPL-licensed software.[151]
Following the GPLv3 release in 2007, some journalists[43][128][171] and Toybox developer Rob Landley[46][47] criticized that with the introduction of the GPLv3 the split between the open source and free software community became wider than ever. As the significantly extended GPLv3 is essentially incompatible with the GPLv2,[100] compatibility between both is only given under the optional "or later" clause of the GPL, which was not taken for instance by the Linux kernel.[14] Bruce Byfield noted that before the release of the GPLv3, the GPLv2 was a unifying element between the open-source and the free software community.[128] 2ff7e9595c
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