| What do you do if you violate the GPL? |
| Written by Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Black Duck Software |
| Thursday, 19 November 2009 18:20 |
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InformationWeek's Serdar Yegulalp makes the case that 'outing' a company (such as Microsoft) that inadvertently uses open source in a commercial product is not a constructive thing. Matt Asay points out on his blog on CNET that "We shouldn't expect open-source adoption to be flawless or painless" and companies -- even large, well run software companies -- will make mistakes. Microsoft made a mistake and ran into strong criticism this week when they acknowledged that a Windows 7 tool had GPLv2 code and that they had not met the license obligations. It makes for interesting headlines and generates a fair amount of hand-wringing, but does nothing to advance the cause of open source, which is really about community development and cooperation. Microsoft will not likely get much credit for how they handled this issue from the ideologues out there, but I think they've done a good job: acknowledged the mistake, removed the objectionable code, and announced their intention to meet the obligations by making the source and binary files available. Not bad I say. And maybe not the response Microsoft would have made in the recent past.
A customer of Black Duck's, Extreme Networks, faced a similar challenge in 2008. In a webinar we broadcast on Nov 17th, Diane Honda, VP and General Counsel for Extreme, explained how they managed a lawsuit from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) over a GPL violation while they were in the process of rolling out Black Duck to manage compliance. They worked with the SFLC to resolve the issue. As Diane explained, and unlike the Microsoft situation where the open source code came in through a contract developer and was not known, Extreme knew they were using open source, believed they were in compliance, but the SFLC believed they fell short. Extreme worked with the SFLC to reach a mutually agreeable solution. The thing about open source is there are many ways it can find its way into a product or code base. It's rarely because a developer is malicious or careless; it's more often due to ignorance of the license obligations or the lack of technology to detect its presence (manual methods are prone to error). Cheers to what open source has done to spur innovation, and jeers to those who pillory companies in public forums when they make an honest mistake and work to correct it.
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