[Gloucs] ot gpl'd windows

[Guy Edwards]

On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 14:21, Roy wrote:
> Hi Guy,
> As a very *slow* novice learner of Linux ,it's my age, I find your 
> listing below ,helps me- in particular- to understand the 'chat' on this 
> list.
> Thank you for that; unfortunately GPL'ing is still a mystery!
> Roy

It wasn't the most factually correct thing I've ever typed :-).

The GPL is the General Public License, the license under which most
Linux software is released. Basically if I write some code I inherently
have copyright on it, I, as the copyright holder, can decide to release
it under whatever license I like really.

If I distribute the code under the GPL, it allows other people to
re-write the code and freely distribute it (there's a lot more to it
than that of course). There's other similar open source licenses but the
GPL is quite special.

When I said I was "GPL'ing windows" I just meant I was trying to put as
much open source alternative software on as possible. This is because
	- It appeals to my budgeting :-)
	- It makes software auditing much less of a headache (checking for
valid licenses)
	- Some of the software is just simply better (Ethereal, Apache, MySQL
etc) than anything proprietary.

Guy

(ps cheers for the suggestions Iain and David)