X-Nico

17 unusual facts about GNU General Public License


Battle.net

A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd.

CDDB

The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License,

Code Synthesis

Code Synthesis dual-licenses ODB, XSD and XSD/e under the GNU General Public License and a proprietary license.

Dimdim

Dimdim was made available primarily as an enterprise edition and as a Virtual Machine appliance, but an open source community edition has also been made available to developers under the GNU General Public License (GPL), giving them the option to install and host Dimdim in their own networks.

FlightGear

FlightGear code is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, thus being free software.

Because FlightGear is licensed under the GNU General Public License, this is fully legal; however, the morals of these operations are questionable, as many customers who have purchased these products are very dissatisfied with what they receive and feel they have been cheated.

Formido

Formido (game), a video game released by MHGames under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)

Iron Seed

As progress on the development of the successor and further patching of Ironseed was unlikely the source code of Ironseed 1 released by the developers to the public under the GPL in March 2013.

LibLime

Koha is a full-featured open-source integrated library system licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Liero

NiL (recursive acronym for NiL Isn't Liero) is a clone of Liero, which runs on Linux and Windows and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Open Build Service

The Build Service software is published under the GPL.

Part-Time Scientists

"PresenTationS" is being developed and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Real Time Media Flow Protocol

RTMFP's underlying protocols are the result of Adobe's acquisition of Amicima in 2006; strong architectural similarities exist between RTMFP and Amicima's GPL-licensed Secure Media Flow Protocol (MFP).

Victor Shoup

His freely available (under the terms of the GNU GPL) C++ library of number theory algorithms, NTL, is widely used and well regarded for its high performance.

Xvid

In contrast with the DivX codec, which is proprietary software developed by DivX, Inc., Xvid is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Since then, all the OpenDivX code has been replaced and Xvid has been published under the GNU General Public License.

Xz

It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL and GNU GPL, with the bulk of the software (e.g., liblzma) in the public domain.


Bzip2

Probably useful for research and prototyping, made available under the BSD/GPL/LGPL, or any other DFSG-compatible license.

C*Base

Copyright and maintenance of C*Base were later entrusted to David Weinehall of Tavelsjö, Sweden, who rereleased the project under the GNU General Public License.

Caisis

It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is entirely web based; written mainly in C#, HTML, and JavaScript it runs on the .Net Framework.

DaDaBIK

DaDaBIK is a commercial software (formerly GPL) written in PHP for quickly creating a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) database front-end or a simple database-driven application without coding.

Dave's own version of Citadel

Along with its offshoots DOC has inspired at least four clone codebases, including YAWC, which is likely the oldest, Jammin, which has since become WeIrDo, bbs100 (which is licensed under GPL), and A better Citadel (ABC).

GNU MIX Development Kit

The GNU MDK, published in book form in 2002, was written by theoretical physics PhD Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz of Barcelona, Spain, and is released under the GNU General Public License, to allow and encourage users to freely share and improve the software.

Hierarchical INTegration

It was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

IFolder

On March 22, 2004, after their purchase of the Linux software companies Ximian and SUSE, Novell announced that they were releasing iFolder as an open source project under the GPL license.

Netfilter

In August 2003 Harald Welte was made chairman of the coreteam, and in April 2004, following a crack-down by the project on those distributing the project's software embedded in routers without complying with the GPL, Welte was granted a historic injunction by a German court against Sitecom Germany, who refused to follow the GPL's terms (see GPL-related disputes).

Sleepycat Software

Sleepycat distributed Berkeley DB under a proprietary software license that included standard commercial features, and simultaneously under the newly created Sleepycat License, which allows open source use and distribution of Berkeley DB with a copyleft redistribution condition similar to the GNU General Public License.