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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"
I wonder who pays these gentlemen.
If you had read the summary you'd see they work for the OSI and the Linux Foundation. Hardly organizations that are anti-GPL, anti-FOSS or anti-Linux.
I chose the AGPL for a web project of mine, and the protection it gives is pretty essential. Without it someone could take the code, improve it and run their site based on it without sharing the improvements back.
You may hate that etc, and prefer not to share the improvements back, but for my web project I've been able to add lots of improvements to my code that derivative sites wouldn't have been obliged to share otherwise, and everyone enjoys the better code as a result.
If you don't think that's fair I'd be interested to hear why not.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);