The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and
future of the free software movement. The location is
significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior
vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU
Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting
the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device
originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built
to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy
overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed
by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox
laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool
of the free software community. In simplest terms, the
GPL locks software programs into a form of communal
ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the
"digital commons"-through the legal weight of
copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable.
Derivative versions must carry the same copyright
protection-even derivative versions that bear only a
small snippet of the original source code. For this
reason, some within the software industry have taken to
calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads
itself to every software program it touches.
Pages:
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43