Topic summary
Viral license
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Copyleft.
"Viral" licensing
"Viral license" is a pejorative name for copyleft licenses. It originates from the terms 'General Public Virus' or 'GNU Public Virus' (GPV), which dates back to 1990, a year after the GPLv1 was released. The name 'viral license' refers to the fact that any works derived from a copyleft work must preserve the copyleft permissions when distributed.