Business Week article on GPL's potential weaknesse

Swampfox writes "This should technically be under GNU, though the article is entitled Linux May Be Running On Some Spindly Legal Legs. It's not a bad article, though, and it basically points out that since the GPL has *yet* to be really tested in court against a well-heeled and motivated opponent (hmm...can anyone think of a well-heeled and motivated opponent of Linux that might be on the horizon?) that it might eventually be an Achilles' heel that could weaken the movement. " Hopefully, this is one of the areas that the FSF will continue to champion and support-and it's a 501(c)(3), so make a contribution to them. The article also talks about the fact that RMS is going to be revising the GPL later on this year.

Comments

Wasn't GPL tested with NeXT and GCC?

[Sean McMillan]

I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that the GPL was tested: If I recall correctly, NeXT used GCC as their C compiler, and made some changes and modifications, namely enhancing it to compile Objective-C as well as regular C. They then refused to distribute the changes, and the FSF took them to task over it. I believe that it even went to court, but I don't have any documentation for that. I don't suppose that anyone has a URL?

The GPL isn't "weak"

[Signal 11]

The author of this article didn't seem to do much research. There are several mailing lists and public editorials available on the subject of the GPL - specifically debian-legal and license-discuss.

My gripe is the same with most postings on linux - the reporters need to do research - ie look before you leap. It's not like we're hiding all this information from you - we make everything public, source included! :)

On the article's points:

- "Portions" The GPL makes this quite clear. ANY amount of source you pull from a GPL'd program, and you /must/ redistribute your work under GPL. the LGPL is different - use that if this is your concern.
- "watering down" of the GPL further down the chain. Regardless of how many programs "down the chain" reuse the code.. it must be made available with all the provisions of the GPL intact. Other licenses may not be so restrictive, but this one is. Of course, nothing prevents you from making a more specific license and redistributing your code under /that/. ie. "Source must be distributed seperately from binary". Nothing in the GPL prohibits this.. it simply requires it be available publicily should it be requested.




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GPL works quite well in practice

[jetson123]

I have observed how the GPL works in corporate environments for a number of years. Its function is to strongly encourage companies to share their improvements to open source software, and it works. Most corporations and corporate lawyers do their utmost to comply with the GPL because lawsuits are such bad publicity and so costly. Looking for loopholes in licenses to software that makes or breaks your releases simply doesn't make a lot of business sense.

The way the GPL functions in the corporate environment is fairly subtle, actually. When develoeprs set out on a new project and they consider basing it on GPL (or LGPL) software, they generally discuss the pros and cons of open sourcing their enhancements carefully. If open sourcing doesn't make business sense, they usually simply won't bother with GPL software. If they do go with GPL software, they license itself serves as something that keeps the source release process on track; without the GPL, the tendency would be to procrastinate with source releases. But in that context, the GPL is not a legal sledgehammer, but a merely a nudge, albeit an important one, to encourage companies to follow through at release time on the commitment to open source they made when starting the project.

Now, let's say that Microsoft deliberately tried to ignore the GPL. So what? Are they going to ship "MS Linux" with a bunch of proprietary APIs and no source code? People use Linux because it's open source, because it's small and simple, and because it has standard APIs; if Microsoft shipped a proprietary version, they'd be missing the whole point.

Misappropriating Linux source code would only make sense for companies that are so strapped for resources and programmers that they can't build anything similar themselves. Microsoft suffers from generating too much code, not from generating too little.

Microsoft has the manpower to put together a proprietary Linux-like kernel in a year or two with no impact on any of their other projects. What they lack is the corporate culture and development processes to put together something like Linux, and that's something they can't buy, copy, or license. (Microsoft's corporate culture and development processes are, however, evidently quite successful for their market segment--for now.)

Finally, there are lots of open source software packages released under licenses that allow commercial entities to ship them without providing source. That doesn't seem to have killed those packages either.