In commenting on the new GPL license and Novell’s announcement of a “mixed-source” partnership with Capgemini, Groklaw writes:
“This whole Novell-Microsoft saga to me was kind of like a hostile takeover of GPL code … Folks who like the proprietary ways better and didn’t much like the GPL, or don’t understand its value, thought the license doesn’t mean what it says or that they could get cute with it and make oodles and boodles of money by selling code that belongs to other people in ways those authors told them in their license they don’t like. Well, the GPL does mean what it says. And if you steal the Golden Egg and in so doing kill the Golden Goose that laid it, what have you accomplished?” Read more.
The problem, of course, is that if the Free Software Foundation wants to get ugly over licenses, the only way to do that is to get the lawyers involved and that will scare enterprises and that is exactly what the proprietary software vendors want.
Does mix-source further muddy the waters?
