By Elliot Zimmerman, Attorney At Law
Fort Lauderdale, FL
legal@cyberlaw.info http://cyberlaw.info The GNU (“Generally Not Unix”) General Public License (“GPL”), or GNU GPL for short, which can be viewed
here, is used by authors who want their works to remain free for others to copy and change. Under the terms of the GNU GPL, the author first copyrights the original work then licenses it to the public to use for free, provided that anyone who redistributes it, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it.
Sometimes, others add changes to the original work licensed to the public under the terms of the GNU GPL which in and of themselves rise to the level of a new original copyrightable work, and not a derivative of the GNU GPL licensed original.
When can the author of an original computer program, who has licensed the initial work to the public under the terms of the GNU GPL, force others, who have copied and changed the original, to freely distribute the resulting new work with the modifications and additions?
