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Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance
An anonymous reader brings news that the Software Freedom Law Center has published a guide for compliance with the GNU General Public License. The purpose of the guide is to prevent "common mistakes" the SFLC has encountered during its various GPL violation investigations. Their suggestions include close scrutiny of software acquisitions, more precise tracking of changes and updates, and avoiding "build gurus." They also provide tips for dealing with a violation. The full guide is available at the SFLC's website.
So... Is violating intellectual property laws a bad thing? Or is it only bad, if the property is that of an open-source programmer, but Ok, if it was created by a musician or an actor?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Exactly. The result is that I have been advising my employer to remove dependencies on GPL and LGPL software from all of our products. Either take a commercial license, find an alternative that has a more permissive licence or roll your own.
its called copyleft for a reason. It represents a typical left-wing approach to control thought and expression. Resist GPL -- support Berkeley, Apache, and the many other more libertarian licenses.
GNU: Free as in Freedom?
Nah, not unless you believe in Democratic as in Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The GPL v3 requires divulging all trade secrets with a product. Because of this, a number of businesses especially those in embedded systems, are just completely ditching GPL libraries and operating systems altogether. Instead, they are moving to Windows CE, Windows XP embedded, QNX, or another completely closed source OS.
For example, one company I am acquainted with has a catalyst for a factory chemical reaction, the machine is sold to other businesses for some product manufacturing. Any GPL v3 software that is included in their embedded systems would force this business to give up the exact details of its catalyst making, something that has been researched and refined for a number of years now and is one of their core trade secrets. They were using Linux, but their counsel told them to recode using Windows CE because all it would take would be one GPL v3 licensed app to pollute a distribution, and they would be forced to give up their crown jewels to anyone (including their competition and foreign rivals) just for the asking.
Another hazy area is using Linux for embedded hardware storage modules for encryption keys. GPL v3 licensed apps require divulging of all secrets (keys included), so it is fundamentally impossible under the GPL v3's terms to use any software licensed under this license for any security sensitive tasks without risking massive legal consequences.
You want to know what is so bad about the GPL? Anything that takes 15 pages to explain how to be compliant and contains recommendations that you change your software development process as part of it is a significant problem. And did you notice those terms that copyright owners might impose? They could cripple a small company (and most software development companies are small).
And that is just GPLv2. GPLv3 and the patent bar makes it even worse. Companies often have to defend themselves from patent infringement suits by using countersuits, or at least threatening countersuits, and the GPLv3 is booby-trapped to prevent that. You could potentially destroy a company through this.
And what do you do with a GPL library? You have to release all of the code you link to it? That is a very poor trade off. The FSF is encouraging authors to release libraries under GPL. That makes them worthless for many commercial applications. Even LGPL is not so good because static linking makes it viral.
As to those who question my use of the term 'commercial'? Sorry that you don't like it but it is the common vernacular. Please suggest a different term rather than name calling and insults.
Sorry you don't like my telling it the way it is. I didn't expect to get a cheering reception but the facts are the facts.
GPL is DANGEROUS if you are selling software. I am sure if you ask Richard Stallman he will tell you it was done that way intentionally. His agenda to change the way the software industry is well known.