legal
/kop'ee-left/ (A play on "copyright") The copyright notice and General Public License applying to the works of the Free Software Foundation, granting reuse and reproduction rights to everyone.
Typically copyrights take away freedoms; copyleft preserves them. It is a legal instrument that requires those who pass on a program to include the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code; the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.
The copyleft used by the GNU Project combines a regular copyright notice and the "GNU General Public License" (GPL). The GPL is a copying license which basically says that you have the aforementioned freedoms. The license is included in each GNU source code distribution and manual.
See also General Public Virus.
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-18)