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Adoption

Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the FOSS domain. A 1997 survey of MetaLab, then the largest free software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the software licensed therein. Similarly, a 2000 survey of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that 53% of the source code was licensed under the GPL. As of 2003update, about 68% of all projects and 82.1% of the open source industry certified licensed projects listed on SourceForge.net were from the GPL license family. As of August 2008update, the GPL family accounted for 70.9% of the 44,927 free software projects listed on Freecode. After the release of the GPLv3 in June 2007, adoption of this new GPL version was much discussed and some projects decided against upgrading. For instance the Linux kernel, MySQL, BusyBox, AdvFS, Blender, VLC media player, and MediaWiki decided against adopting GPLv3. On the other hand, in 2009, two years after the release of GPLv3, Google open-sourc...
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Derivations

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The text of the GPL is itself copyrighted, and the copyright is held by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF permits people to create new licenses based on the GPL, as long as the derived licenses do not use the GPL preamble without permission. This is discouraged, however, since such a license might be incompatible with the GPL and causes a perceived license proliferation. Other licenses created by the GNU project include the GNU Lesser General Public License, GNU Free Documentation License, and Affero General Public License. The text of the GPL is not itself under the GPL. The license's copyright disallows modification of the license. Copying and distributing the license is allowed since the GPL requires recipients to get "a copy of this License along with the Program". According to the GPL FAQ, anyone can make a new license using a modified version of the GPL as long as they use a different name for the license, do not mention "GNU", and remove the preamble,...
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