Copyleft Trivia Quiz

Answer: ideas

The intent is to protect the creator's rights for such things as books, computer software, films, art, photography, or other creative output. The copyright is generally only granted for a limited time. Once a copyright expires, the work enters the public domain.

Answer: Richard Matthew Stallman

Richard Stallman's involvement in computers began during the 1960s. He was part of the hacker group at MIT. Hacker at that time defined a programmer either creating something new or perhaps modifying and improving someone else's code, and was something to seriously aspire to.

The incident described in the question occurred when the MIT hackers basically split into two camps to create a Lisp (LISt Processing) machine. The camp divisions were created because some of the MIT hackers thought that any profit should be reinvested in the company, and others thought that venture capital investments were the better option.

Thus the idea was planted to create a free software license.

Answer: proprietary

Proprietary software, owned by a single company or person, assigns rights to the users generally via an End User License Agreement.

Copyleft utilizes copyright law to enforce a license so that the item may be freely used, modified, and shared so long as the end product retains the same license, and source code is made available. Richard Stallman coined the copyleft term in approximately 1985.

Answer: General Public License

Richard Stallman eventually quit his job at MIT (though for a while he was still allowed to use their computers) to create software that could be freely distributed. He thought to begin first with an OS, because without it the computer doesn't compute. Thus began the GNU Project. The GPL was intended to be a more generic license (i.e., not tied to a specific piece of software or code) and to continue the practice of sharing code.

The first version of the GPL was released in 1989, and it has been revised several times since.

Answer: Mozilla Public License

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is maintained by the Mozilla Foundation, with products such as Firefox, and Thunderbird.

Not all copyleft licenses have the same requirements. The MPL license was created to be a compromise between the proprietary BSD license and the free GPL license.

Answer: No

The GNU GPL (version 3, dated 6/29/07) states: "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things."

In fact, you can indeed charge for the software that you've created using the GPL license. The license also specifies that the source code must be made available and that others may redistribute and modify it. Alternatively, if you never distribute what you created, then you do not need to make the code public.

Answer: Linux

The creation and distribution of Linux is one of the best known examples of a GNU GPL distribution. It was originally coded for Intel x86 systems, but has now been ported to many other hardware platforms. The code has been used to create other operating system variations such as Debian, Fedora and openSUSE.

Answer: public domain

Items in the public domain are there either because the rights have expired or have been forfeited. In addition, any work generated by the US Government is considered public domain.

A programmer's code is automatically copyrighted and the programmer must actively disclaim copyright.

Answer: General Public Virus

Soon after the first GPL license was released opponents began calling it "General Public Virus" or "GNU Public Virus". The major opponents were those that believed that the sharing of code would compromise their intellectual property.

There are many articles that report that the use of the word "virus" was intended to connote such a negative understanding of copyleft that programmers would discontinue using those licenses. The term is still in use today, and arguments continue.

Answer: Creative Commons

The Creative Commons focus was to be able to license a creator's rights based on a combination of the following: Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial and No Derivative Works. A creator could then combine these to create a license specific to their creation.