From ac74d6348873fdda8cc9048300ae32340249ab2f 2014-03-16 19:11:17
From: Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@ebb.org>
Date: 2014-03-16 19:11:17
Subject: [PATCH] First revision of these two sections.

---

diff --git a/gpl-lgpl.tex b/gpl-lgpl.tex
index d735a3f715307b700f07dd5341195b7adc29d596..fd244b0eafed554f86b0318e58b87297f83e57df 100644
--- a/gpl-lgpl.tex
+++ b/gpl-lgpl.tex
@@ -699,10 +699,68 @@ economy.
 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
 \chapter{A Tale of Two Copyleft Licenses}
 
+While determining the proper methodology and criteria to yield an accurate
+count remains difficult, the GPL is generally considered one of the most
+widely used Free Software licenses.  For most of its history --- for 16 years
+from June 1991 to June 2007 --- there was really only one version of the GPL,
+version 2.
+
+However, the GPL had both earlier versions before version 2, and, more well
+known, a revision to version 3. 
+
 \section{Historical Motivations for the General Public License}
 
+The earliest license to grant software freedom was likely the Berkeley
+Software Distribution (``BSD'') license.  This license is typical of what are
+often called lax, highly permissive licenses.  Not unlike software in the
+public domain, these non-copyleft licenses (usually) grant software freedom
+to users, but they do not go to any effort to uphold that software freedom
+for users.  The so-called ``downstream'' (those who receive the software and
+then build new things based on that software) can restrict the software and
+distribute further.
+
+The GNU's Not Unix (``GNU'') project, which Richard M.~Stallman (``RMS'')
+founded in 1984 to make a complete Unix-compatible operating system
+implementation that assured software freedom for all.  However, RMS saw that
+using a license that gave but did not assure software freedom would be
+counter to the goals of the GNU project.  RMS invented ``copyleft'' as an
+answer to that problem, and began using various copyleft licenses for the
+early GNU project programs\footnote{RMS writes more fully about this topic in
+  his essay entitled simply
+  \href{http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html}{\textit{The GNU Project}.
+    For those who want to hear the story in his own voice,
+    \href{http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/}{speech recordings} of his talk,
+    \textit{The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System}
+    are also widely available}.
+
 \section{Proto-GPLs And Their Impact}
 
+The earliest copyleft licenses were specific to various GNU programs.  For
+example, \href{http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/emacs_gpl.html}{The Emacs
+  General Public License} was likely the first copyleft license ever
+published.  Interesting to note that even this earliest copyleft license
+contains a version of the well-known GPL copyleft clause:
+
+\begin{quotation}
+You may modify your copy or copies of GNU Emacs \ldots provided that you also
+\ldots cause the whole of any work that you distribute or publish, that in
+whole or in part contains or is a derivative of GNU Emacs or any part
+thereof, to be licensed at no charge to all third parties on terms identical
+to those contained in this License Agreement.
+\end{quotation}
+
+This simply stated clause is the fundamental innovation of copyleft.
+Specifically, copyleft \textit{uses} the copyright holders' controls on
+permission to modify the work to add a conditional requirement.  Namely,
+downstream users may only have permission to modify  the work if they pass
+along the same permissions on the modified version that came originally to
+them.
+
+These original program-specific proto-GPLs give an interesting window into
+the central ideas and development of copyleft.  In particular, reviewing them
+shows how the text of the GPL we know has evolved to address more of the
+issues discussed earlier in \S~\ref{software-and-non-copyright}.
+
 \section{The GNU General Public License, Version 1}
 
 \section{The GNU General Public License, Version 2}