Legal
131
<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs.
If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary
applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
License instead of this License.
GNU General Public License (Version 3)
Version 3, 29 June 2007
Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <
http://fsf.org/
>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing
it is not allowed.
Preamble
The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to
share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee
your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software
for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of
our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to
your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public
Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software
(and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you
can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do
these things.
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to
surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the
software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on
to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or
can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the
software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify
it.
For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for
this free software. For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be
marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous
versions.