14 DAY TRIAL // GPL or GNU GPL stands for the GNU General Public License which was originally written by Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, for the GNU project. According to the GPL, a computer program enjoys the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure preservations of the privileges even when it is altered or has more additions. An important aspect that is worth mentioning here would be that the source code under the GPL is not public domain. Through GPL the rights of developers and also of the end-users are protected.
The GPL is de-facto associated with free and open source software and it is known as the most popular license in the field. The results from a survey from 2001 revealed that 50% of the source code in Red Hat Linux 7.1 was licensed under the GPL. Linux kernel and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) are two of the most prominent examples of softwares licensed under the GPL.
In 1991, there was released a second version of the GPL and the third version, GPL 3 is expected this July. As the release of GPL 3 is getting close, it also became fervent topic for a lot of controversies and debates. GPL3's main purpose would be - according to Mr. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) - cleaning up the language, closing the loopholes, at the same time targeting other two significant issues: "Tivoization" and patent threats. The "tivoization" word comes from the Tivo digital video recorder device and refers to those types of devices, like Tivo, which run on GPL code and make source code available but the hardware is locked against user-modified code; therefore, if the application is not provided with the correct digital signature, the device won't work.
The software patents problem is the other important aspect that demanded new additions to the current GPL license. And the most outstanding example I could bring to emphasize the problematic side of the software patent concept would be Microsoft, which keeps bringing in this issue in various situations. For example, on the occasion of a partnership with Novell Inc. company, Steve Ballmer states:
"And we agreed on a, we call it an IP bridge, essentially an arrangement under which they pay us some money for the right to tell the customer that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered. There will be no patent issues. They've appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property. In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability."