Copyleft and Reciprocity
Partly to emphasize the role of copyright law to protect the freedom of GPL-licensed software and partly to create a catchy term to highlight their focus on software freedom, the authors of the GPL coined the term copyleft to describe its license bargain. It is both a play on the word copyright and an acknowledgment that it promoted a radical (i.e., left-wing, perhaps) departure from traditional software licensing models. The role of a copyleft software license is to grow the public commons of software rather than allow each owner's copyright to pull from that commons.
The Free Software Foundation also describes copyleft as a rule that, when redistributing a program, one cannot add restrictions to deny other people the ...
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