A few years after the release of the
GPL, Perens says he decided to discard Electric Fence's
homegrown license in favor of Stallman's lawyer-vetted
copyright. "It was actually pretty easy to do," Perens recalls.
Rich Morin, the programmer who had viewed Stallman's
initial GNU announcement with a degree of skepticism,
recalls being impressed by the software that began to
gather under the GPL umbrella. As the leader of a SunOS
user group, one of Morin's primary duties during the
1980s had been to send out distribution tapes
containing the best freeware or free software
utilities. The job often mandated calling up original
program authors to verify whether their programs were
copyright protected or whether they had been consigned
to the public domain. Around 1989, Morin says, he began
to notice that the best software programs typically
fell under the GPL license. "As a software distributor,
as soon as I saw the word GPL, I knew I was home free,"
recalls Morin.
To compensate for the prior hassles that went into
compiling distribution tapes to the Sun User Group,
Morin had charged recipients a convenience fee.
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