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UK Govt Warned: Don't Buy GPL
JPMH writes "ZDNet is reporting that a UK IT industry body backed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel, BAE Systems and other high-tech heavyweights has urged the UK government not to commission open-source software, and particularly not software covered by the General Public License. According to Intellect, which lobbies for about 1,000 UK IT companies, the requirement of open-source licences for software funded by the government could have a negative impact on competition for contracts, the quality of the resulting software and even the confidentiality of government departments. In particular, Intellect recommends that the government drop the GNU General Public License (GPL), the licence upon which the GNU/Linux operating system is based, from its list of acceptable default licences for government-funded software, and steer clear of the GPL generally."
Don't automatically assume free (as in beer), just because of the GPL license. Remeber, a GPL'd piece of software _can_ be charged for, as long as the source is included or available to all parties.
-- p06 "On religious wars: They're essentially wars over whoo's imaginary friend is better"
You're damn right its tax-payers' dollars we're talking about. Whenever the UK government buys software from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etcetera, they are essentially converting British Pounds Sterling into US Dollars and sending them off to US-owned companies. At least with GPL software its less likely to be spent improving a foreign economy, as we have as much chance to compete here in the UK, what with having access to the source code of this non-proprietary software.
It works that way up to a point - but if the government then chooses to share the code with someone else they aren't allowed to restrict that someone else from further sharing the code under the GPL.
If you commision GPL code from another party you could limit their rights by contract (you haven't distributed the code to them under the GPL, they have distributed it to you).
If you bring someone in as a contractor to do work for hire on the code then you may not have "distributed" the code outside of your organisation - so they might not have rights to it under GPL.
If you want another organisation to work on the code you have to distribute it to them under GPL, which would seem to mean that you can't place further restrictions (like NDA, classified etc.) on them that would prevent them distributing the code further.
GPL doesn't prevent you keeping things secret. It does prevent you doing a limited distribution and requiring the recipients to keep things secret. Unfortunately that is exactly what most military stuff needs - "secret" classification doesn't mean you can't tell anyone, it means you can't tell anyone who hasn't got the right clearance (which means they can't tell...).