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Notes
Chapter 1 notes
1.
For more on the term “hacker”, see Appendix B.
Chapter 2 notes
1.
Actually, the GPL’s powers are not quite that potent. According to section 10 of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (1991), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the Free Software Foundation’s willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the GPL would replace.
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software that is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
“To compare something to a virus is very harsh”, says Stallman. “A spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting”.
For more information on the GNU General Public License, visit
2.
See Shubha Ghosh, “Revealing the Microsoft Windows Source Code”,
