HistoryEdit The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, for use with programs released as part of the GNU project. The original GPL was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs (1985),[16] the GNU Debugger and the GNU C Compiler.[17] These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program, rendering them incompatible, despite being the same license.[18] Stallman's goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible for many projects to share code.