efaq: Real meaning of copyleft
2.2 What is the real legal meaning of the GNU copyleft?
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The real legal meaning of the GNU General Public License (copyleft) will
only be known if and when a judge rules on its validity and scope.
There has never been a copyright infringement case involving the GPL to
set any precedents. Although legal actions have been brought against
companies for violating the terms of the GPL, so far all have been
settled out of court (in favor of the plaintiffs). Please take any
discussion regarding this issue to the newsgroup
<news:gnu.misc.discuss>, which was created to hold the extensive flame
wars on the subject.
RMS writes:
The legal meaning of the GNU copyleft is less important than the
spirit, which is that Emacs is a free software project and that
work pertaining to Emacs should also be free software. “Free”
means that all users have the freedom to study, share, change and
improve Emacs. To make sure everyone has this freedom, pass along
source code when you distribute any version of Emacs or a related
program, and give the recipients the same freedom that you enjoyed.
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