The Open Source Software community was founded on the notion that any party can use, modify and further distribute OSS, so long as that party contributes back to the OSS community the human-readable “source code” of any changes/ enhancements made to the software. Unfortunately, the Free Software Foundation’s recent efforts to revise the GNU General Public License have eroded this core “share-and-share-alike” principle. More specifically, the FSF’s failure to fix a legal glitch in the GPL called the “ASP Loophole,” and its treatment of certain OSS developers more favorably than others in terms of which of their OSS enhancements they are asked to contribute back to the OSS community, have relegated certain OSS developers to second-class status and have (along with other FSF missteps) caused dissension and division within the OSS community.
Link: metrocorpcounsel.com
Category:
- Open Source
