Stallman did to open licensing what Stanford and MIT did for MOOCs, taking the original concept and making it commerce-friendly.

It is not hard to find free software licenses prior to GPL. For example, from the original LPMud license: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=files&s=displayfile&fid=3&d=/&f=Copyright

I discuss this point at length here: http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2011/05/oer-debate-in-full.html