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\section{A Community of Equality}
The GPL uses copyright law to defend freedom and equally ensure users'
rights. This ultimately creates an community of equality for both
business and noncommercial users.
The previous section described the principles of software freedom, a brief
introduction to mechanisms that typically block these freedoms, and the
simplest ways that copyright holders might grant those freedoms to their
users for their copyrighted works of software. The previous section also
introduced the idea of \textit{copyleft}: a licensing mechanism to use
copyright to not only grant software freedom to users, but also to uphold
those rights against those who might seek to curtail them.
Copyleft, as defined in \S~\ref{copyleft-definition}, is a general term this
mechanism. The remainder of this text will discuss details of various
real-world implementations of copyleft -- most notably, the GPL\@.
This discussion begins first with some general explanation of what the GPL is
able to do in software development communities. After that brief discussion
in this section, deeper discussion of how GPL accomplishes this in practice
follows in the next chapter.
Simply put, though, the GPL ultimately creates an community of equality for
both business and noncommercial users.
\subsection{The Noncommercial Community}