We have another chance to validate the GPL in court.
While the author reiterates and dismisses the analogy of the GPL to a virus, I want to build on it. Imagine for a minute that the current case succeeds in confirming the gist of the GPL in that you must release your code if you build on top of GPL technologies. That’s a step up from the settlement in FSF vs. Cisco. This solid legal ground inspires an intrepid geek in the Dakotas to reverse engineer Microsoft C++ libraries to discover serious GPL violations. This leads to every major software vendor being sued and forced to release their source code under the GPL.
Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft, and EA suddenly dump billions of lines of code on github. Now you don’t have to be a nation-state to review the source to Windows. What will people think or do? The storm of forks and merge requests on github seems inevitable. That leads to a world wide uptick in GDP as we spend less time fighting with lame software bugs. A smaller productivity benefit come from the millions of software developers stuck on old version control systems freed from their toil. And obviously there will be way too much source code for the community to review by hand, but in this imaginary apocalypse we would also have the code for all of the commercial source code review tools available too. There would be no reason not to pick and choose the best parts and produce the ultimate GPL’d source code analyzer. Then we can make a report card of how our software titans are doing. How many would get a passing grade? How would the Microsofties hold their heads up when Joe Q Public could provocatively ask “was writing Windows without memory bounds checking such a hot idea, smart ass?”
Links
Shared with: Public