Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

8 – Exploring Open Source for Educators: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore – Entering OS
operating system for the industry. Hence the recursive
name of the project, “GNU is Not Unix” (Free Software
Foundation, Inc. 2007). In 1985, Stallman founded the
Free Software Foundation, Inc. (FSF), a non-profit organization
dedicated to supporting the free software
movement in general, and the GNU Project in particular.
Between 1984 and 1988, GNU and the FSF developed
special licences for specific GNU programs (Tai,
2001). This licensing approach was eventually consolidated
in February 1989 as the GNU General Public Licence
(GPL) Version 1 (Tai, 2001). The GPL became the
gold standard for ensuring the future of freely sourced
software for a variety of reasons. First, the GPL protected
user rights to free software by delineating responsibilities
with regard to distribution, copying and
modification of the software. While similar to earlier
licences, the GPL was unique in that:
if you distribute[d] copies of such a program,
whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients
all the rights that you have. You must
make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must tell them their rights
(Free Software Foundation, Inc., February 1989).
Here, Stallman ensured that any distributions would
carry the original rights to distribute, copy and modify.
This was further specified in Section 2.b stating that any
secondary programming containing the original free
work “be licensed at no charge to all third parties under
the terms of this General Public License” (Free Software
Foundation, Inc., February 1989). Thus, the GPL effectively
prevented proprietary commercialization of the
free programs. As opposed to “copyright”, GPL became
commonly known as “copy left.” 11
From the programmers’ perspective, another critical
aspect of GPL was that the licence ensured any distribution,
copying, or modification would always make clear
that the originators of the software did not provide any
type of warranty with regard to the software. The GPL
was updated as Version 2 in 1991 along with the release
of a licence variation called the Library GPL. The second
version of GPL included a section to counteract claims
that users were unable to fulfill the GPL licence and
were therefore not bound by the terms. GPL Version 3 is
currently under discussion. Some new aspects have to
deal with digital rights management issues, as high-
11
While copyright prevents free distribution, copying and
modification of intellectual works, or copyleft, assured the
opposite.
lighted in legal cases against peer-to-peer sharing of
copyrighted materials.
Two additional licensing documents connected to the
GPL are the Library GPL, or as it’s now called, the GNU
Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and the Free
Documentation Licence (FDL). The LGPL was originally
released in 1991 and updated in 1999 (Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 1991/1999). It was developed to
allow non-free software to interface with free software.
Previously, under the terms of the original GPL, such an
interaction would have made the “using” non-free software
subject to the GPL (Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 1991/1999). The FDL was added to the GPL legal
library in November 2000. It was later revised in 2001
and 2002. The original intention was to align manual
licensing requirements for GPL software with the GPL,
but the licence scope is not limited to free software
manuals. The FDL applies to “any manual or other
work, in any medium” and ensures the work has “a
world-wide, royalty-free licence, unlimited in duration”
as long as the FDL terms are met (Free Software Foundation,
Inc., November 2002). Similar to the GPL, with
regard to the work in question, the FDL grants:
everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute
it, with or without modifying it, either
commercially or noncommercially … this License
preserves for the author and publisher a way to get
credit for their work, while not being considered
responsible for modifications made by others (Free
Software Foundation, Inc., November 2002).
Through the GPL licences, Stallman and the FSF legally
and successfully entrenched the ethical obligation to
keep free software and any derivative works free. Ultimately,
many subsequent agreements, like those among
the 58 licences approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative,
2006b) or The Debian Social Contract Version
1.0 (Software in the Public Interest, 1997) owe a great
deal to the GPL. Stallman and Moglen said this of GPL
in 2005:
The GPL is employed by tens of thousands of
software projects around the world, of which the
Free Software Foundation’s GNU system is a tiny
fraction. The GNU system, when combined with
Linus Torvalds’ Linux—which has evolved into a
flexible, highly portable, industry-leading operating
system kernel—along with Samba, MySQL,
and other GPL’d programs, offers superior reliability
and adaptability to Microsoft’s operating
systems, at nominal cost. GPL’d software runs on
or is embedded in devices ranging from cell-
Education for a Digital World 99