In the last post I gave Jacobsen-v-Katzer as an example of the viral nature of the GPL. From all accounts, it seems that Katzer (or an employee) intentional took the code and violated the license.
A better example would be Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. In this case, an outsourced developer used GPL’d code which was then incorporated into a Microsoft product. The product was released and the copyright holder noticed. Now Microsoft has released the code under the GPL. This was GPLv2 so the patent portion wasn’t relevant and I’m not sure that there were any patents involved in the tool. But what this does show is how the GPL’s viral nature can affect companies. Imagine if this had been Word or SQLServer. The implications could have been huge.
There are lots of examples of outsourcing horror stories (like here). And these are the things that get caught. If Microsoft’s code review couldn’t catch GPL’d code in a relatively small application, what are the odds that your companies code review would catch GPL’d code in your flagship product?
While off topic, what would it do to your companies forecast if they lost all of the intellectual property associated with their main project? That’s a risk that should be considered before outsourcing. Anyway, the point of this was just to give a better example of the viral nature of the GPL, not complain about outsourcing.
Stephen Burch
