does Microsoft hold copyright to any GPL code? [LWN.net]

does Microsoft hold copyright to any GPL code?

Posted Mar 20, 2018 23:54 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: Six more companies adopt GPLv3 termination language

or the question should be stated as, has Microsoft released any GPL code (especially GPL v3 code)

to post comments

does Microsoft hold copyright to any GPL code?

Posted Mar 21, 2018 0:05 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

If nothing else, their contributions to the Linux kernel are under GPLv2.

(And the very fact that Microsoft has contributed code to the Linux kernel is still somewhat mind-boggling..)

does Microsoft hold copyright to any GPL code?

Posted Mar 21, 2018 3:55 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

That isn't surprising considering they make hypervisors (Hyper-V, Azure) and people use Linux on those.

They also make other hardware, some of which either can be connected to Linux systems or is general purpose enough to be able to run Linux based operating systems.

does Microsoft hold copyright to any GPL code?

Posted Mar 21, 2018 13:18 UTC (Wed) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]

The Microsoft monopoly started to have to back off in recent years.

Otherwise Office on Android would never be a thing at all.

The days of them enforcing their browser, their office suite, their OS, etc. on everyone are waning. Shown by the fact that they have had to give away Windows 10, and Office is their biggest money spinner (along with their cloud offerings).

If they hadn't got on board with the virtual-machine support, etc. then people would be running Linux hypervisors with Windows VMs, instead of the other way around, and that way just ends in tears for them.

SQL Server for Linux, shell scripting on Windows, etc. are just further symptoms of the same phenomenon (somewhat half-hearted in some cases, but they're obviously testing the water).