Microsoft Pulls Windows 7 Tool After GPL Violation Claims

Last week, Within Windows noted something suspicious in regards to Microsoft’s use of the GNU’s General Public License (GPL): “While poking through the UDF-related internals of the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, I had a weird feeling there was just wayyyyyyyyy too much code in there for such a simple tool. A simple search of some method names and properties, gleaned from Reflector‚Äôs output, revealed the source code was obviously lifted from the CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project. (The author of the code was not contacted by Microsoft.)”

Redmond remained quiet until yesterday, when the company pulled the tool in question from its servers.