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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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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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Text and other media

It is possible to use the GPL for text documents instead of computer programs, or more generally for all kinds of media, if it is clear what constitutes the source code (defined as "the preferred form of the work for making changes in it"). For manuals and textbooks, though, the FSF recommends the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) instead, which it created for this purpose. Nevertheless, the Debian developers recommended (in a resolution adopted in 2006) to license documentation for their project under the GPL, because of the incompatibility of the GFDL with the GPL (text licensed under the GFDL cannot be incorporated into GPL software). Also, the FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007. If the GPL is used for computer fonts, any documents or images made with such fonts might also have to be distributed under the terms of the GPL. This is not the case in c...
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