Since the GPL was written, a great number of programs have been released under it. Most of the programs in the GNU project are licensed under either the GPL or the LGPL, including GCC, GNU Emacs and the GNOME desktop. Furthermore, all products licensed under the LGPL are also licensed under the GPL, per section 3 of the LGPL.

See GNU for a list of articles on prominent GNU programs. Programs which are not part of the GNU project, but are licensed under the GPL, include:

• Amanda
• Ardour
• Cheesetracker
• The Doom computer game
• FreeDOS
• FreeMind
• Gaim Instant Messenger
• GNU Multi-Precision Library
• KDE
• Linux kernel
• Licq
• Moodle
• Mutt
• OpenNAP
• Open hardware
• Perl (dual-licensed with the Artistic License)
• Qt toolkit (dual-licensed with the Q Public License, as well as for-fee licenses to proprietary software vendors)
• The Quake computer game and its sequel, Quake II
• Rosegarden
• The Roxen webserver
• Samba
• Supercollider
• Tyrant (computer game)
• WordPress
• X-Chat
• XFce
• Zinf

Note that some of these were originally released under other licenses, and were only later made available under the GPL.