Uncharted issues in intellectual property area

The effect of different GPL-related lawsuits on large enterprise customers is less predictive for linux then for Solaris. Sun looks less vulnerable to this danger, although usage of open source products licensed under GPL on Solaris might lead to some legal challenges for the largest customers as SCO lawsuit demonstrated all too well. Also there is some background noise about General Public License (GPL) version 3 which in some respects is more radical then the previous version (GPL version 2). For example it contains some provisions about software patents. See NewsForge Eben Moglen explains highlights of GPL3 second draft for more information. The author considers GPL to be a manifesto of software anarchism and as such having inherent problems in large enterprise environment [Bezroukov2004a]

According to Fortune "Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents."[Parloff2007] It might want royalties from distributors other then Novell (with which it signed patent truce) and large corporate users.

Right now a lot of fun is expected from the process of adoption of GPL v.3 which probably increase the sufferings from multiple personalities disorder Linux has. It is too early to tell how many of existing 400+ distributions of linux will split into strictly GPL. 2.0 and GPL 3+ version. Some initial move by Samba team suggest that it will be pretty ugly.

Litigation happy open source activists created a lot of fuss recently with BusyBox (an integrated set of standard Unix utilities optimised for for mobile environment) suits. Paul McDougall in his article IT's Newest Title 'Open Source Compliance Officer' went as far as to suggest the companires using GPled software might need Open Source Compliance Officer.

To a list that includes CIO and CTO you can now add, thanks to a legal settlement, 'OSCO'. And here's why your company might soon need to hire one.
The background: Two developers of open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) earlier this year sued a tech vendor for using their product in a manner contrary to the license.

Specifically, Erik Andersen and Rob Landley claimed that networking hardware vendor Xterasys used their BusyBox software without providing its source code to end users, as the GPL requires.

... ... ... ...

The question is whether all this is good or bad for the open source software movement. It's possible that the SFLC's sudden litigiousness will scare off potential open source users. That's something Andersen and Landley might want to think about while counting their Xterasys money.

That suggests that in rare cases when actual usage includes redistribution with new product to clients outside the corporation using BSD licensed software or dual licensed software (Perl is a classic example of dual licensed software) is much safer for large corporations. It is OK to modify software

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Created Jan 2, 2005. Last modified: February 28, 2008