Copyleft
- Date
- 1984-1985 · confidence high
- Place
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation); term coined by Don Hopkins
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Stallman devised a licence -for GNU Emacs, the seed of the GPL- that uses copyright law itself to guarantee that software and its derivatives remain free; the term 'copyleft' was suggested to him by Don Hopkins.
What it led to
- The GNU General Public License (GPL) and the free software movement
- Shared licensing models such as Creative Commons