OLS: Enforcing the GPL [LWN.net]

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 25, 2004 6:55 UTC (Sun) by akumria (subscriber, #7773)
In reply to: OLS: Enforcing the GPL by stockholm
Parent article: OLS: Enforcing the GPL

I work for a company which does development for an OEM. The very first thing they say is what licenses we are allowed to use on the project. Some they don't mind if we use GPL, some they do.

In all cases though we are required to deliver a report at the end detailing each component, what its license is and the status of our compliance with it. That also goes for the propreitary modules.

The only change between doing this with propreitary modules versus using Free Software is that sometimes the license of Free Software stipulates extra conditions regarding when/where you have to make the code and/or your changes available.

If a company can't be bothered complying to a Free Software license (which are realtively simple) what makes you think they would bother complying to a commercial one? Either a company actually determines and lives up to its obligations or it doesn't.

Free Software doesn't mean you can have a free ride. Everything has a cost - the companies Harald has exposed just believed they could get away with it. If no one pushed the GPL then we would have more damage in the long term with companies believing they had no obligations at all - which just isn't the case.

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