CSC 379:Week 2, Group 2

GNU General Public License

Discussion Questions

• What is the impact of GPL use?

• What are the ethical considerations for licenses like GPL that require their adoption if work licensed under it is incorporated into a parent work, with additional stipulations that include the acceptance of the most current version of the GPL license?

An Examination of a Recent Related Event: The Microsoft/Novell partnership

Recently Microsoft partnered with their rival Novell, the makers of Suse Linux, in an effort to optimize virtualization for each other's operating systems, among other promised features. Since Suse Linux is covered under the GNU General Public License, this raised some unique concerns. GNU licenses cover only free programs but with this new agreement Microsoft will be paying a royalty to distribute Suse Linux Enterprise. Even though legally this agreement is valid, many developers who have contributed their work to Suse over the years with the understanding that it would be covered under the GNU feel betrayed by this and consider it a breach of the agreement.

Another ethical dilemma arises when one considers that the GPL agreement included patent protection for Novell customers only if Microsoft's intellectual property was discovered in Linux. However, Novell has not yet officially acknowledged that Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents.

Some argue that an agreement to make operating systems better optimized for one another as the demand for servers to run multiple operating systems increases can only be beneficial to customers, companies and the development community as a whole.

You can read more about the announcement, reactions and criticism at these external links:

• GNU Agreement which covers all of Suse Linux
• The Announcement
• Reaction from some GNU Software Developers