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The GNU project was officially announced on 27 September 1983 by Richard Stallman. Thirty-five years of a project that has now become the fundamental building block of everything we use and see in technology in 2018. I would not be wrong to say that there isn't a single proprietary piece of software that anyone is still using from 35 years ago – please post comments if there is something still being used.
There is only one reason for this longevity: the GNU project was built upon the premise that the code is available to anyone, anywhere with the only restriction that whatever is done to the code, it shall always be available to anyone, forever. Richard Stallman's genius in crafting the copyleft license that is the GNU General Public License is probably the best hack of the 20th century software industry.
Extra: Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 28 2018, @04:51PM
Actually it's not as if all developers must agree at once to it. There can be lobbying to add the "or later" (or even just a more restrictive "or 3") clause to the license of individual code snippets; such code snippets continue to be license compatible with code only under GPL version 2. Then when a critical mass is reached, an effort can be started to replace the code of people who don't want to add the version 3 disclaimer. As soon as all code has the "or later" or "or 3" clause, it can be easily switched to GPLv3.
Indeed, should it actually happen that people withdraw their license due to CoC issues, it might even speed up such a transition project, because then that code has to be written anew anyway, so the "or later" provision can be added to all that new code immediately.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.