Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

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.

2009 Note

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

Written by Brett Smith and Richard Stallman.

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