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

Related

[schmidt349]

In other news, Darl McBride was seen dancing a little jig at the corner of 42nd and Broadway in New York City.

A source close to the situation informed Slashdot that he was in fact accepting small change to offset his legal fees for the next phase of his litigation against Linux users.

Re:Doubts raised about the length of Rob Malda's D

[Anonymous Coward]

and 12 Microsoft employees have been assigned to post on /. using their wit and intelligence. If they can find it.

Re:Not as bad as it sounds!

[Omnifarious]

Well, it doesn't have any terms in it that I'm not happy about.

Re:Not as bad as it sounds!

[Sloppy]

Because the GPLv2 is abandonware. If FSF wants to pick it up and spin a GPLv2.1 and an LGPLv2.1 off the GPLv2 branch, then maybe it would be a viable license.

If only they had released GPLv2 under GPLv2, then you could fork it yourself. But now you're stuck with a proprietary free software license that you can't maintain, except by crawling on your hands and knees to FSF, hoping that they see sufficient market for free software licenses to stay in the license development and maintenance business.

Re:Think of it as a security patch

[Bruce Perens]

You really can run "patch" on the old and new GPL texts, but the result is larger than the original. The intent is the same in both licenses. But the original didn't require as much firewall code as, alas, we do today :-)

Re:Conspiracy?

[EvilBudMan]

--Besides, if you want to see an "extreme" license, read the average commercial EULA sometime--

Microsoft has a sell soul to "Old Scratch" clause in their stuff.

Re:real issue, but is GPLv3 the solution?

[TangoMargarine]

OpenCola