copyleft 1. A guarantee that free software licensed under the GPL is not just free for today, but that it remains free tomorrow. 2. Freedom expressed in a viral form. There are a lot of free software licenses. Just ask the folks at the Free Software Foundation. They list a lot of them. Far and away the most popular of these is the GPL. This causes hard feelings sometimes, especially with those who favor the laissez-faire styled BSD license. And of course, there are all the folk lusting after that GPL'd code who dislike it because they cannot seize the code and make it their own. The GPL is my personal favorite in this genre. The reason I prefer it over the BSD license is its copyleft nature. Both licenses say "Here, take this code. Look at it. Modify it any way you like. Use it for anything you like. It is free, as in free speech." The BSD license stops there. It provides no protection for the code once it is in your hands. Or once it leaves your hands. That means, for example, that a company or an individual can take the code and make it proprietary. They can sell the binaries and never share the changes to the source code they may have made with anyone. With small, one-man projects, that means the proprietary version can be the only one left standing when the original author loses interest or dies. Not so with the GPL and its copyleft protection. The freedom survives the author. The GPL copyleft provides this protection by reversing the normal use of copyright to restrict use of or access to the code. The GPL copyright prevents others from claiming it for themselves. SCO's announced binary licensing scheme for Linux will undoubtedly end in a legal test of the GPL itself. Stallman Richard Stallman is the patriarch of the free software movement. When he experienced first-hand the loss of community and efficiency that occurred when the source to the printer code at the MIT computer lab was no longer freely available, he knew there must be a better way to license code than the closed, proprietary model. The GPL and the Free Software Foundation are his creations. There is little doubt that Linux is as popular with developers as it is because it is licensed under the GPL. Unfortunately, Stallman is also the main problem that people see with the GPL. He is inflexible. He is binary. He sees no exceptions to the way he sees things. In his view, free software licensing is always the right choice. Period. Further, the free software license people choose should be copylefted, like the GPL. His efforts to make more people aware of the fact that Linux is a kernel and doesn't exist or have use without its GNU system framework have accomplished little other than to draw fire. Insisting that others refer to Linux as GNU/Linux in order to make his point is probably the single worst PR move in the history of software. But Stallman remains convinced that he is right and that the rest of the world will come around to his way of thinking eventually. What's the big deal? Why is free software important? Here is one small example. When Susan and I win the lottery, or when I get rich from a best-selling novel, whichever comes first, we are going to build an animal shelter called "The Evelyn Road Foundation." The name comes from where Susan found three tiny puppies abandoned, dropped off by an Austinite, most likely, in the middle of the two-lane road. After we create the foundation and have a small kennel area to board our rescues, we're going to need software to keep track of adoptions, placements, medical histories, donations, and so on. Being a foundation is not easy. Thanks to Bob Tetley, and because there is such a thing as free software, we can find a useful application to do exactly what we need. It's called Animal Shelter Manager, and it's a fairly new arrival on Freshmeat.net. ASM is written in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS/X, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, OS/2, and of course, Linux. Version 1.12 was made available on July 20, 2003. I've already downloaded and installed it on my desktop box. I scraped my knuckles getting it installed. It requires a later version of Java than I previously had, so I needed to install that as well. I also needed mysql-server. Most of my problems came from getting Java and mysql to talk to each other. Once past that sticking point - it took me over a day to find the problem and correct the startup script - it was smooth sailing. ASM is a very nice job indeed. Kudos to the author for writing it. And for making it available under the GPL. If you use a lot of proprietary software, you may be thinking "Over a day just to install? That's not acceptable!" I agree with you 100 percent. If ASM were proprietary, or even if ASM were still free but a highly popular project, I would be very vocal in my criticism. Ask the MPlayer developers if you don't believe me. But ASM is different. ASM exists because there is a need for it. That need is not large enough to attract the commercial developers. Without the notion of free software, it might never have been shared with others with the same need. Just as Richard Stallman was trying to return the software scene to its Eden-like state of goodness and utility before he lost access to the printer code, free software today is in many ways a throwback to the original days of personal computing. Before it became Bill Gates' personal goldmine as a result of IBM's entry in the market. ASM got developed not because there was a chance to get rich, but because there was a need that wasn't being met. It is definitely software in the public interest. It helps people do good things. The difference between the good old days, when it probably would have been made available as public domain freeware, is the license. Now everyone can rest assured that this software will remain in the public interest. What if we find things in ASM that we don't like, or want done differently, or find things we need done that aren't being handled at all? We could write the developer and ask that they be changed or added. Or we could do it ourselves. The GPL requires that if you distribute the code you make the source available. That means I can go to SourceForge (or wherever it is being made available) and download the source code and make the modifications myself. It's self-help software as well. What if we decide to modify ASM and make it suitable for use in running a ranch raising goats, or donkeys, or cattle, or horses? No problem. We can do whatever we like with the code. It is free from restrictions on use. But if we ever distribute the forked application, or the new application based on ASM, then we have to provide the source code too. That way when you get our application, the code is still just as free as it was when we got it. That's a good thing. That's copyleft. Resources: Free Software Foundation What is Copyleft? Animal Shelter Manager