On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 04:05:42PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> This is why the Free Software Foundation makes efforts to produce a
> *General* Public License; one which can be generally applied to software
> works, instead of inflating the number of incompatible licenses out there.
Tangent: 'GPL' was historically intended to be parsed as {General
Public} License (license to/for the general public), not General
{Public License} (general variety of public license). The later use of
the term 'public license', both in proper names of several licenses
and in occasional general use to mean 'free/open-ish license',
probably resulted from the parsing of 'GPL' as 'General {Public
License}' and also of course 'GNU {Public License}'. The latter error
was no doubt aided by the fact that 'GNU' and 'General' share the same
initial letter.
The pre-GPLv1 program-specific GNU licenses used 'General' in their
name ("Emacs General Public License", "GNU CC General Public License").
- RF
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