Origin<\/b>:<\/p>\n
Free software initially did not exist (or was not conceived as such), because almost all software being developed was already freely distributed. This was because access to computing centers or computers of the time was the true and main limitation. However, with the decrease in hardware costs and the rise of professionalization in the sector, personal computers became available to a wider public, and what was previously inaccessible (limited to the military, universities, and large corporations) found new avenues for dissemination to the general public, such as the distribution of... unauthorized copies<\/b><\/i> (the misnamed piracy).<\/p>\n
It was during those times, the late 70s and early 80s, that for various reasons one of the hackers of MIT <\/b><\/i>(Richard <\/i>Stallman) opposing the growing privatization <\/i><\/b>of the software, conceives the idea of \u200b\u200ban operating system, software and community <\/i>free<\/b>, that is to say, programs<\/b><\/i>\/estate <\/i>cultural <\/b>that, not being free, could be freely distributed.<\/p>\n
Although this idea seems novel today, its principles have been used for centuries in the scientific world, where knowledge progresses from existing knowledge (as Newton would say, standing on the shoulders of giants), the formulation of new questions to be answered or needs (new unknowns in the equation), and the peer review<\/b><\/i> (in the case of software, the inspection of algorithms to study their correctness).<\/p>\n
This idea, to create a new operating system, which at the time seemed quite far-fetched, generated two major contributions that laid the foundation for its philosophy:<\/p>\n
This concept, copyleft, was not created to eliminate copyright or authorship rights. Instead, its first step is to recognize these rights for the author and then provide a license or agreement (such as the GNU GPL or General Public License) that permits the use<\/b><\/i>, copy <\/i><\/b>and distribution<\/b><\/i> of the work that is attached to it, also granting more benefits, since all derivative works or those that use programs included in it for their operation, must maintain the original license type.<\/p>\n
In other words, copyleft arises so that by making use of the license it grants, to a certain extent \u201ccontagion<\/b>\" to the products derived from the rights collected in the original and has allowed some developments which were initially going to be proprietary and were based on or made use of copyleft software (for example, the gcc compiler or the gnu-emacs editor for gnu-linux, protected by the GPL), to have to be released to this license if they wanted to be distributed to the general public, in turn increasing the potential of the free software community.<\/p>\n
Later, to make the license a little more flexible, the LGPL or reduced GPL was created to allow non-GPL programs to link to them (provided they do not constitute derivative works); in turn, the community also opened up to new areas, creating the GNU-FDL license focused on written materials (manuals, textbooks), among others.<\/p>\n
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