Wrote section on GPLv1.
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gpl-lgpl.tex
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gpl-lgpl.tex
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@ -763,6 +763,40 @@ issues discussed earlier in \S~\ref{software-and-non-copyright}.
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\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 1}
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In January 1989, the FSF announced that the GPL had been converted into a
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``subroutine'' that could be reused not just for all FSF-copyrighted
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programs, but also by anyone else. As the FSF claimed in its announcement of
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the GPLv1\footnote{The announcement of GPLv1 was published in the
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\href{http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull6.html#SEC8}{GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1
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no. 6, January, 1989}. Thanks very much to Andy Tai for his
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\href{http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/}{consolidation of research on
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the history of the pre-v1 GPL's.}:
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\begin{quotation}
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To make it easier to copyleft programs, we have been improving on the
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legalbol architecture of the General Public License to produce a new version
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that serves as a general-purpose subroutine: it can apply to any program
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without modification, no matter who is publishing it.
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\end{quotation}
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This, like many inventive ideas, seems somewhat obvious in retrospect. But,
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the FSF had some bright people and access to good lawyers when it started.
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It took almost five years from the first copyleft licenses to get to a
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generalized, reusable GPLv1. In the context and mindset of the 1980s, this
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is not surprising. The idea of reusable licensing infrastructure was not
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only uncommon, it was virtually nonexistent! Even the early BSD licenses
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were simply copied and rewritten slightly for each new use\footnote{It
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remains an interesting accident of history that the early BSD problematic
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``advertising clause'' (discussion of which is somewhat beyond the scope of
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this tutorial) lives on into current day, simply because while the
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University of California at Berkeley gave unilateral permission to remove
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the clause from \textit{its} copyrighted works, others who adapted the BSD
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license with their own names in place of UC-Berkeley's never have.}. The
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GPLv1's innovation of reuable licensing infrastructure, an obvious fact
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today, was indeed a novel invention for its day\footnote{We're all just
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grateful that the FSF also opposes business method patents, since the FSF's
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patent on a ``method for reusable licensing infrastructure'' would have
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not expired until 2006!}.
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\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 2}
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\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 3}
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