Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab

The commencement of the GNU project in 1984, with its goal to give users freedom, required the establishment of new distribution terms that would prevent the project being turned into proprietary software. The method used was Copyleft and the resulting license was called the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Today the GNU GPL is the most widely used Free Software license, and as its author, the FSF works to help the wider community use and comprehend it.