Red Hat and Intel have settled a licensing hiccup that threatened to prevent the Linux company from contributing to Intel’s open-source project–a reminder of the frictions that can arise between the commercial tech world and the open-source community.
Intel, Red Hat Cure Open-source Hiccup
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Eugenia Loli
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Well this is good. People with laptops will be overjoyed.
I wonder what those other “important parts” are that Linus referred to as far as dual licensing?
This is really a shame, why take care of using the GPL if anyone works around it ?
>>This is really a shame, why take care of using the GPL if anyone works around it ?<<
Because te GPL was a major problem here. The options were not take any of the updates and wait for someone else to do it under a differant license,which would be hard since people would claim they saw the GPL’d patches or something, thus the refinements would never be able to be made. Or find some sort of work around the GPL. I’m rather amazed Intel has any of their stuff under GPL for just these reasons. Then again If Redhat had just submitted patches under something other GPL they would have been fine to. Then the code under both Licenses could be updated and Redhat could use the GPL’d version back in their software. But it looks like they were trying to pull a stunt and it obviously didn’t work.
>>This is really a shame, why take care of using the GPL if anyone works around it ?<<
You make it sound like Intel are working around other people’s use of the GPL, they are not. They are changing the license of THEIR OWN software to allow FUTURE improvements which are submitted to be included in both their open source and proprietary products.
Legally speaking any improvements previously submitted are already under the GPL and will have to be ignored, unless (I think) the authors explicitely agree to license their code (i.e. the improvements) under the new license. Anybody who writes improvements in future will have the choice as to whether they will keep them to themselves, submit them to Intel (fully aware of the license), or indeed, unless this is a major deviation from the BSD license they are using, release it to the world under the GPL (though I hope they won’t do that).
GPL is mainly written not to co-exist with the commercial world, but rather to eliminate it – thus the big reason why I would disagree if GPL is used in a commercial way. But if you are using GPL for your software, please, do go ahead. Your code = your license. But I still support non-copyleft licenses, particularly stuff like BSD licenses that is very similar to public domain software, only is frees you from potential legal liability from stuff like waranty.
The code was dual licensced for a reason. Commersial companies want to use it without having to open their souce code; ie: MSFT uses the code in the Windows Kernel. They GPLed the code to allow it to be used in the open source community; ie: so Linux could use it. The big problem was that any changes to the GPLed version couldn’t be rolled back into the closed version.
This is one of the reasons the BSD liciences work much better. They say you can use the code in your work with out forcing you to open your work. The main point in the BSD liciences is that you must tell everyone that you included the code in your work.
The complaints I always hear about the GPL is that it’s viral, if you use it in a project you have to release the entire project as GPL.
The BSD allows you to use code in your projects with out releasing anything, but people worry that companys will take without giving back.
Why not compromise? Create a new license where you can use the code for anything (like BSD), but if you make any improvements and release a product using the code you must release the improvements (like GPL).
>>Why not compromise? Create a new license where you can use the code for anything (like BSD), but if you make any improvements and release a product using the code you must release the improvements (like GPL).<<
Because at that point your not very far off from being the GPL. If your a company basing things off opensource one of the things you don’t want to do is release your improvements. Though some companies do release some things.
You can get in a grey area very fast on what would be an improvement to GPL’ed code and what is part of your product.
For for what your talking about I think the LGPL (lesser GPL, i think). is there. I belive it’s premiss is you can use LGPL code in a closed product. So you could link things like LGPL’ed libraries in your code.
I belive ether the LGPL or both the GPL and LGPL have a bit that you can use them in closed code as long as the product isn’t dependant on that code. If it could be removed and remain functional you would be ok. But I’m not entirely sure on this.
BSD is great for proof-of-concept or sample code, but I would think twice about really releasing code for a project I was serious about under a BSD-style license. It seems that most BSD-style projects have to beg developers to send in code or worry about competing proprietary commercial forks (look at Wine before the license change).
I always release under the GPL. The way I see it, developers can still make money selling or supporting a product I develop and I get all of the bug fixes and improvements that come with testing.
Yeah, you actually heard me say that! This has nothing to do with BSD vs GPL or anything like that. The software in question is Intel’s ACPI software layer. It is an OS independent module that is designed to be incorporated into any OS that wants to implement ACPI. It was made that way to allow as many OSs as possible to support Intel’s ACPI hardware. The software only exists to advance the hardware. Thus, it is a special case of software, and the reasoning behind it’s licensing are not generally applicable. The fact that it was only GPL and CA licensed in the beginning is largely a function of the fact that only Linux and some proprietory OSs (probably Windows) incorporated the module.
The most major differences in these two types of licenses is what possesses the freedom. The GPL does not limit any use, only distributions, i.e. you do not have to license derivative works as GPL unless you distribute them. Of course, BSD-like licenses have not problems with distribution and their only limitation appears to be the sometimes included advertising clause. However, both licenses are equally “Free”. The difference is the GPL gives all freedom to the software itself, allowing it to evolve as freely as possible. The BSD-like licenses provide all freedom to the coder, allowing him or her to use the code as needs be. So, a choice between the two licenses is dependent on whether you feel the code or the coder needs all of the freedom. In this case with Intel, they felt both were important and chose to allow the use of both licenses, which also facilitates the use of a third. Actually, this is pretty clever.