CSC 379:Week 2, Group 2

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GNU General Public License

Overview

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?


  • What ethical considerations are highlighted by the patent sharing/protection agreement between Microsoft and Novell?

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

Recently Microsoft partnered with 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.


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/gpl-advantages.html

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