The GPL has been upheld in court in various places, but I am not sure if it has
in a major case in the US, yet. When Red Hat win, and it becomes common
knowledge, it will be a very big win for the GPL, and others may stop and think
a bit more clearly before violating it. Maybe others such as the Busybox
developers will be able to stop fighting constant GPL violations, and have more
time to spend on what they are good at, which is developing code. Admittedly,
they and their lawyers have been rather good at defending the GPL too. There
may however be an undesirable side effect. The typical PB, when faced with the
knowledge that Twin Peaks have been thrashed in court for GPL violation, may not
take sufficient time to ask why, and just place a complete embargo on the use of
GPL code in their business. We know there is no need for that, because any
business can adapt its working practices, with minimal difficulty, to be able to
use GPL code legally. The requirements placed on developers and distributors are
not particularly onerous, and there are no significant restrictions at all on
end users. Maybe we should all spend a bit more time explaining the GPL to our
local PHB? They tend to believe what the read in the likes of Forbes, which is
typically very inaccurate where FOSS is concerned. Actually, I think it is
intentionally inaccurate about almost everything, but that is another topic
altogether. As an aside, my employer has re-organised, and there are now
effectively two seperate companies in the building where I work, one
headquartered elsewhere. The IT manager of the "other" company, a die-hard Gates
worshipper, was recently made redundant, and funnily enough the department now
works more efficiently. But out new IT manager is based on the other site. He
was here the other day, and told me that he has been nearly 20 years in UNIX and
Linux. Already our new internal intranet is running on a Linux server. The PHB
several levels up from me appointed him, knowing his background. Things are
looking up..... [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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