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## The GNU Project.

GNU Pascal is part of the GNU project which was founded by Richard Stallman in 1984. The aim of the GNU project is to provide a complete operating system with editors, compilers etc. as Free Software.

People often confuse Free Software with public domain software or have other wrong information about the GNU project. If you want to know it definitely, please read the GNU General Public License.

For even more information, please consult the official GNU home page of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), http://www.gnu.org/ or one of its mirror sites.

Some small notes about common misunderstandings follow.

- It is legal to compile commercial, including non-free, programs written in Pascal with GNU Pascal. They do not automatically become Free Software themselves.
- “Free” is opposed to “proprietary”, but not opposed to “commercial”. Free Softare can be – and is in fact – distributed commercially for a real price. In contrast, most non-commercial software does not meet the open source criteria and thus does not qualify as Free Software.
- When you modify a free program released under the GNU General Public License, e.g. the GNU Pascal compiler itself:
  - You can released and license your own modifications (as a separate entity) any way you like.
  - If you distribute or publish the whole work with your modifications, including or derived from GPL licensed parts, the whole work (including your modifications) must be licensed under the terms of the GPL. (Note: This does not contradict the previous point since you can license your work in several ways.)
  - You do not have to distribute or publish the whole work at all. In this case the question of license of the whole work does not arise.
  Please note: These are informal explanations which should not be construed as legal advice. The legally binding text is only the text contained in the license statement.
- When using libraries for writing proprietary programs, check the libraries' licenses carefully. The GNU Lesser General Public License allows linking a library to non-free software under certain conditions, the ordinary GNU General Public License does not.
- It is legal to charge a fee for distributing Free Software. If somebody sold you a copy of GNU Pascal you could have got without paying for it as well, that's in agreement with the GNU General Public License.
- However if somebody wants you to sign an agreement that you won't re-distribute the Free Software you have got, it would be illegal. That person would lose the right to use and distribute that Free Software.
- The preferred form to distribute Free Software is in source code. This ensures that everybody has the freedom to customize the software or to fix bugs by themselves. When we also distribute GNU Pascal binaries we do it only to simplify installation and to encourage its use.