Chapter 17 - GNU GPL

I start with the title of the first part of the chapter: "Information wants to be free". This is really strong argument. As Matthew Lesko is saying in his article that information is the currency in the world today and those who owns it are the richest; What will happen if something so powerful would be totally free?

We have the Copyright law which protects the owner of an original work of authorship. We also have trademarks, patents, industrial design rights, trade secrets and etc. Contrary to this we have Copyleft which gives bigger opportunities and freedom to the users to spread and change the piece of work by removing restrictions on distributing copies and works witch are modified for others and requires the same rights to the works which are done after the original.
The first Copyleft license is called GNU GPL - General Public License and its goal is to protect the freedom of the user, not to limit it. It is developed by Richard Stallman and his colleagues in 1989 an according to this user have rights to:

• use, copy and distribute the work for any purpose (including business)
  
• study the work - for software, demands inclusion of the source code
  
• modify the work and develop new works based on it
  
• distribute the derived works under the same conditions

It seems that user will have some kind of power to somebody else's work by just taking the original piece of work as basic and start creating something new out of this.
If huge amount of information would free, then we would live in more developed world than we do now.
I like the idea of GPL, because it gives the freedom where all the good things can start.