Doubts Raised About Legal Soundness of GPL2

svonkie writes "Two prominent IP lawyers have warned that the all-pervasive General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is legally unsound. They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software. 'If you go back in time to when GPLv2 was written, I don't think people were aware of just how ubiquitous this license would become and how closely scrutinized it would be,' said Mark Radcliffe, partner at the firm DLA Piper and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). 'At that time, open source was not something as broadly used as it is now.' Radcliffe was joined by Karen Copenhaver, partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and counsel for the Linux Foundation, for a GPL web conference hosted by the license-sniffing firm Black Duck software"

Comments

Re:Not as bad as it sounds!

[Hognoxious]

Stinking hypocrite hippies! They're no better than the evil corpra$hun$ they claim to hate!

Re:Conspiracy?

[BitZtream]

What has he done? Pissed people off? Ran people away from OSS?
He has a big loud mouth, thats why he seems like an outstanding contributor.

Others have done more for far less recognition and with far more sanity.

I recognize he's done a lot for the OSS community, but the majority of it has been scaring people away. You are either part of his cult, or you aren't. If you are, you probably won't be next week when he add his new rant about how software can be made more free by using his restrictions instead of someone else. For those of us who aren't with him, we constitute the enemy of the state, he has no middle ground, and we when not laughing at him, are wincing at what he's perverting the idea of OSS into and crying about the number of idiots who choose to follow him.