« Dell for replacement APC batteries | Main | My favorite bike ride »
September 2, 2003
The virus that is GNU
<a title="GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF)" href="http://www.gnu.org/">GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF)</a> has created a virus that threatens the entire software world. It is the GPL. Linking to GPL'ed code can make your code part of it and therefore you do not have much IP protection. This is bad for all software developers. My friend Troy sent a good link to a well thought through tread on the subject:
One of the lists I skim, cni-copyright, covered the GPL in pretty good
detail:
https://mail2.cni.org/Lists/CNI-COPYRIGHT/List.html
.. then search for: Open Source Licensing
I'll let the thread stand by itself except to say that the FSF's enforcement of the license has been very consistent and at least *their* intent is very clear. Can't comment about anyone else's intent..
Troy
Posted by Martin at September 2, 2003 8:22 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.nwventurevoice.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/781
Comments
Larry Rosen's opinion is worth reading since he's General Counsel at OSI:
https://mail2.cni.org/Lists/CNI-COPYRIGHT/Message/3376319.html
and on OSI's license-discuss list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/license-discuss@opensource.org/
Remains to be seen whether the FSF's enforcement of the GPL is consistent with a court's enforcement in any given jurisdiction. I don't think SCO/Caldera v. IBM will address whether the GPL means what the FSF thinks it does unless Caldera releasing its Linux distro becomes the deciding issue.
Posted by: Troy at September 3, 2003 11:08 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)