Just a quick comment. [LWN.net]

Just a quick comment.

Posted Nov 25, 2003 0:28 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
In reply to: Examining an attack on the GPL by virtex
Parent article: Examining an attack on the GPL

I agree with most of what you said here, but there's one part I want to comment on.

"In other words, if you have included GPL code in your proprietary program, you are not allowed to distribute your program until the conflict is resolved, most likely by removing the offending code. Relicensing the entire codebase under the GPL is also an option, but it's certainly not the only one, and I doubt many corporations would agree to do this."

Actually, this has been done. NeXT, for example, released the source for their Objective-C frontend for GCC precisely because of this. There's also the Linksys business, which LWN has covered before; there's still some issues there, but apparently Linksys is trying to do the right thing. I could name more examples, but that would require me to Google for them, and I'm too lazy. :-)

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Linksys in a bind

Posted Nov 25, 2003 4:01 UTC (Tue) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

Yeah, Linksys appears to be trying fairly hard to do the right thing, but they're caught between the GPL and some federal laws mandating that software radios are closed source (so nobody can tamper with them and cause radio interference, which can be dangerous). The last message from the FSF suggested that everybody's trying to find a reasonable solution.