McAfee Worried Over "Ambiguous" Open Source Licenses

willdavid writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that McAfee, in their annual report, has warned investors that "ambiguous" open source licenses "may result in unanticipated obligations regarding [McAfee] products." "McAfee said it's particularly troubling that the legality of terms included in the GNU/General Public License -- the most widely used open source license -- have yet to be tested in court. 'Use of GPL software could subject certain portions of our proprietary software to the GPL requirements, which may have adverse effects on our sales of the products incorporating any such software,' McAfee said in the report filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among other things, the GPL requires that manufacturers who in their products use software governed by the license distribute the software's source code to end users or customers. Some manufacturers have voiced concerns that the requirement could leave important security or copyright protection features in their products open to tampering."

Comments

I vote with my euros

[wikinerd]

I am not going to buy McAfee products.

Re:I don't get it

[someone1234]

I hope they will get their taste of the GPL in court.

Did they just admit to what I think they did?

[bruns]

Did McAfee just openly admit that they stole code from GPL'd software? If they did... boy was that... stupid to say the least. Nothing like giving the gpl-violations.org people a nice goal.