The Microsoft license also requires inclusion of a specific statement. That requirement would not in itself prevent the program from being free: it is normal for free software to carry license notices that cannot be changed, and this statement could be included in one of them. The statement is biased and confusing, since it uses the term “intellectual property”; fortunately, one is not required to endorse the statement as true or even meaningful, only to include it. The software developer could cancel its misleading effect with a disclaimer like this: “The following misleading statement has been imposed on us by Microsoft; please be advised that it is propaganda. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.”
However, the requirement to include a fixed piece of text is actually quite cunning, because anyone who does so has explicitly accepted and applied the restrictions of the Microsoft patent license. The resulting program is clearly not free software.
Some free software licenses, such as the most popular GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), forbid publication of a modified version if it isn’t free software in the same way. (We call that the “liberty or death” clause, since it ensures the program will remain free or die.) To apply Microsoft’s license to a program under the GNU GPL would violate the program’s license; it would be illegal. Many other free software licenses permit nonfree modified versions. It wouldn’t be illegal to modify such a program and publish the modified version under Microsoft’s patent license. But that modified version, with its modified license, wouldn’t be free software.
Microsoft’s patent covering the new Word format is a US patent. It doesn’t restrict anyone in Europe; Europeans are free to make and use software that can read this format. Europeans that develop or use software currently enjoy an advantage over Americans: Americans can be sued for patent infringement for their software activities in the US, but the Europeans cannot be sued for their activities in Europe. Europeans can already get US software patents and sue Americans, but Americans cannot get European software patents if Europe doesn’t allow them.
All that will change if the European Parliament authorizes software patents. Microsoft will be one of thousands of foreign software patent holders that will bring their patents over to Europe to sue the software developers and computer users there. Of the 50,000-odd putatively invalid software patents issued by the European Patent Office, around 80 percent do not belong to Europeans. The European Parliament should vote to keep these patents invalid, and keep Europeans safe.
The EU directive to allow software patents was rejected, but the European Patent Office has continued issuing them and some countries treat them as valid. See http://ffii.org for more information and to participate in the campaign against software patents in Europe.
Copyright c 2005, 2009 Richard Stallman
This essay was originally published on http://gnu.org, in 2005. This version is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2010).
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
Part V.
The Licenses
Chapter 27.
Introduction to the Licenses
This part contains the text of the latest versions of the primary GNU licenses: the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). Though they are legal documents, they belong in this book of essays because they are concrete expressions of the ideals of free software.
Software development for the GNU operating system began in 1984. Once Richard Stallman had parts of the GNU system that were worth releasing, he needed a license to release them under. Some free software licenses already existed; these gave users permission to modify and redistribute the software, but they also allowed using the code in proprietary versions and proprietary programs. Using those licenses, GNU would have failed to achieve its goal of delivering freedom to all users, because middlemen would have converted the GNU code into proprietary software.
So Stallman devised a license to assure every user the freedom to modify and redistribute the software. It granted these permissions under one key condition: whoever distributed the software must pass along the authorization to modify and redistribute that same software, along with the source code making it practical to do so. Stallman coined the term “copyleft” (see “What Is Copyleft?” on p. 127) to describe this key twist of using the legal power of copyright to ensure freedom for all users.
GNU copyleft licenses were first developed for software, and later for related areas such as software documentation. In them, the principles of the free software movement, explained throughout the essays in this book, take practical form. Each of their successive revisions has had to wrestle with free software’s legal and practical obstacles and offers numerous illustrations of how free software ideals are codified into legal terms.
The Origins of the GPL
The first version of the GNU General Public License was published in 1989—but Stallman had been releasing software under copyleft licenses as part of the GNU Project since as early as 1985. Prior to 1989, each published GNU program had been covered by a license specifically tailored for it. Instead of a single GNU General Public License, there was a GNU CC General Public License, a GDB General Public License, and so on. These licenses were identical except for minor differences: for instance, terms about displaying license notices to users were different for different programs and, unless it covered a program that was just one source file, each license contained the name of the program it applied to.
By 1989, Stallman had had enough experience with different GNU packages under slightly different licenses to conclude that it was crucial to unify them into one license that would cover all these packages. He worked with Jerry Cohen, an attorney at Perkins Smith & Cohen LLP, to collect concepts from all the different licenses written up to that point, and bring them together into one license. It was thus that on 1 February 1989 the GNU General Public License was born.
The first version of the license sought to ensure two results: first, that all derived works of the software would be released under the same license and, second, that everyone who received the software would have a chance to get the source code. These requirements implement a strong copyleft by blocking the three main ways of making programs proprietary: with copyright, with end user license agreements, and by not distributing source code.
In comparison to the program-specific licenses that had preceded it, GPL version 1 featured few substantial changes—the GPL was evolutionary, not revolutionary—but it made a big practical difference. Previously, developers who had wanted to copyleft a program had needed to tailor one of the existing licenses to that program. Many had not bothered. With the release of the GPL, those developers had a license they could use out of the box to provide all of their users with freedom to share and change the software. It was a powerful tool.