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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"
So, I actually count myself among the few that like Richard Stallman. I've met him, and he's a nice guy. But does anyone recall the furor over GPLv3 when it first came out, & some of the new provisions? This caused a lot of projects to stick with v2.
I'm wondering if this isn't just FUD to try to get people to switch to v3. Which is icky, but it did occur to me.
~dijjnn
better story: OSI attempts earth-shaking announcement about GPL to draw attention away from fact that their status as nonprofit in California is suspended. Perhaps it was due to failure to file required tax documents (for California and U.S. IRS) for many years, that issue was discussed on Bruce Peren's now-defunct site Technocrat
http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/corpdata/ShowAllList?QueryCorpNumber=C2224685