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 I could wax poetic and say that the GPL is our best hope for freedom in the Information Age - wait, I just did, didn't I?  Seriously, the GNU General Public License, or GPL, is a license under which software can truly be "released" to freedom (pardon the weak-@$$ pun).   It all stemmed from an idea expressed by the Free Software Foundation

Somewhere in the dawn of the computing age, someone wrote a program and gave it away.  It became what we now call "Public Domain" - nobody claimed ownership of it, not even the original author.  Someone else, a worthless schmuck of a person you can be sure, encountered this free program and realized that, with some subtle changes, it had commercial value.  This schmuck applied for and was granted a copyright for the altered version of what was once a free program,  in effect rendering it no longer free.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Not wanting some similar schmuck to similarly steal their work, the members of the Free Software Foundation and GNU still wanted to give their work away, so they devised a license for their works which required that, if someone copied it, the license had to be included, and that if they changed the code in any way, their changed program had to be covered under same terms as the work from which it was derived, that is, derivative works could not be witheld from public use.  This germinal idea was termed CopyLeft, since it was a reversal of the usual usage of copyright law in which copyrights were used to actually grant everyone the right to copy!  (What a concept, huh?)  This made the schmucks of the world very mad, so they sued everybody they could think of to sue, and generally caused a great ruckus instead of realizing that they, too, could have stood upon the shoulders of giants and seen all the further.

So, when did this turn into a fairy tale, and when did I develop a Jewish accent to my writing?  It's not important!  What's really, really, really important is to realize that the GPL is the engine that has driven the development of Linux thus far.  Now, in its first true legal challenge, we can only hope that it will pass the test that the American legal system has put before it.  What's at stake here is the future of innovative computing - we can't afford to lose!
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