Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
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Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#2Yes. Question: does it matter? Not really, im sure this happens all over the place - M$ are just high profile.
I dislike the mud slinging paragraph at the end of the post - I dont see the relevance.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#3freedom that contains coercion is ironic
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#4The GPL can't force them to work on getting the code included in the mainline kernel.
They did this for one reason plain and simple: competitive advantage over VMWare.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#5Of course not. All the reports I have seen say it is driver code. Therefore it very well could have been a Nvida style Blob driver if they wanted to keep the source buttoned up.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#6freedom that contains coercion is ironic
It depends on whose freedom you want to promote. The GPL is for protecting the freedom of software recipients. The BSD license if for protecting the freedom of software developers.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#7Yes. Question: does it matter? Not really, im sure this happens all over the place - M$ are just high profile. I dislike the mud slinging paragraph at the end of the post - I dont see the relevance.
You're right. It probably does happen all the time. Just last week in one of those GPL vs. BSD threads someone posted a link to a story about how the author of CLISP was more or less coerced into using the GPL license. In any case, through coercion or not, releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is probably the right thing to do. Many users are strongly against loading proprietary binary blobs into their kernel. Still, not all vendors open source drivers so that ones that do could potentially enjoy a competitive advantage.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#8They just did another GPL release to integrate their Live tools with Moodle. I think that somebody decided to change policy.
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#9Of course not. All the reports I have seen say it is driver code. Therefore it very well could have been a Nvida style Blob driver if they wanted to keep the source buttoned up.
And enterprise Linux suppliers/users are going to just certify/install a binary blob from Microsoft into the kernel?
Re: Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL?
#10Yes. Question: does it matter? Not really, im sure this happens all over the place - M$ are just high profile. I dislike the mud slinging paragraph at the end of the post - I dont see the relevance.
You're right. It probably does happen all the time. Just last week in one of those GPL vs. BSD threads someone posted a link to a story about how the author of CLISP was more or less coerced into using the GPL license. In any case, through coercion or not, releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is probably the right thing to do. Many users are strongly against loading proprietary binary blobs into their kernel. Still,…
To be fair, the CLISP guy seemed to want to GPL his stuff towards the end of the thread. RMS was, as always, heavy-handed and mentioned legal action before even asking, "hey, do you want to GPL this"? That says nothing about the GPL and a lot about RMS' personality.
The end result is that CLISP is one of the better CL implementations, and seems to have a pretty decent following. I don't know if it was like that before it was GPL'd or not, though.