Soon, we hope, Emacs will
not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the
license applies to all of it.See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author.
Gilmore wasn't the only
person suggesting a more general approach. By the end
of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU
Project's next major milestone, a source-code debugger,
and was looking for ways to revamp the Emacs license so
that it might apply to both programs. Stallman's
solution: remove all specific references to Emacs and
convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella
for GNU Project software. The GNU General Public
License, GPL for short, was born.
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman followed the software
convention of using decimal numbers to indicate
prototype versions and whole numbers to indicate mature
versions. Stallman published Version 1.0 of the GPL in
1989 (a project Stallman was developing in 1985),
almost a full year after the release of the GNU
Debugger, Stallman's second major foray into the realm
of Unix programming.
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