GNU General Public License
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The GNU General Public License is a free software license that allows people to use, modify, and share software while requiring that any changes they make remain free for others to use as well. It matters because it enables collaborative software development and prevents companies from taking free software and making proprietary versions that restrict user freedoms.
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The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses. The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that it guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software, but if you distribute a derivative work or modification, you must provide the source code to those recipients under the same or equivalent license terms — there is no requirement to publish anything to the public at large. The GPL was the first copyleft license available for general use. It was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL states more obligations on redistribution than the GNU Lesser General Public License and differs significantly from widely used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.