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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

The license contained a preamble
spelling out its political intentions:
The General Public License is designed to make sure
that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies
of free software, that you receive source code or can
get it if you want it, that you can change the software
or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you
know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions
that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask
you to surrender the rights. These restrictions
translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.See Richard Stallman, et
al., "GNU General Public
License: Version 1," (February, 1989).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html
In fashioning the GPL, Stallman had been forced to make
an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the
old Emacs Commune. Where he had once demanded that
Commune members publish any and all changes, Stallman
now demanded publication only in instances when
programmers circulated their derivative versions in the
same public manner as Stallman.


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