Changes

Mainly as a result of two United States landmark cases, it is considered legal to reverse engineer and emulate any system. More specifically, there was a ruling meant to allow were rulings which allowed commercial emulators to profit. Two commercial [[Playstation]] emulators: [[wikipedia:Bleem!|Bleem]] and [[wikipedia:Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station|Connectix Virtual Game Station]] allowed the ability to play ps1 games on pc, something Sony didn't like the sound of, and were sued by Sony around the early 2000's. The results led to modern legal standards regarding emulation as of today. <!--need fact check/source-->

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or just GPL) is one of the most popular open-source licenses in the free software community, and for good reason; it's has remained one of the strongest copyleft copy-left licenses, requiring users to share their contributions (some might say to an insane degree).

The GPL has two widespread versions; version 2, (written in 1991, ) and version 3, (written in 2007). No one talks about version 1 (1989). The GPL3 was meant to reconcile license compatibility, address software patents, license violations, nullifying [[wikipedia:Digital_rights_management|DRM ]] by calling it an ineffective technological measure, and the big one; [[wikipedia:Tivoization|Tivoization]], which was a severe flaw they completely missed when drafting the first two versions that allowed Tivo to make use of GPL2 software by sharing its code while preventing unsigned firmware from being loaded on the hardware. The GPL3 prohibits this, which proved to have major problems when Hyperkin tried to incorporate the GPL3-licensed [[RetroArch]] in the [[Retron5]] (among other violations).