IT Manager's Journal: 10 Common Misunderstandings About the GPL

"The GNU General Public License (GPL) is one of the most widely used software licenses--and, undoubtedly, the most misunderstood. Some of this misunderstanding comes from hostile propaganda, but some also comes from a lack of experience in licensing issues on the part of both lawyers and lay users, and the use of standard language in conventional end-user license agreements that are unthinkingly coupled with the GPL. In all cases, the confusion is frequently based on misreadings, rumors, secondhand accounts, and what is convenient to believe.

"To get a sense of the most common misunderstandings, NewsForge consulted with three experts: Richard Fontana, a lawyer with the Software Freedom Law Center and one of the main drafters of the third version of the license; David Turner, former compliance engineer at the Free Software Foundation who is assisting with the revisions of the license; and Harald Welte of the GPL-Violations project, which tracks possible cases of non-compliance and tries to assist in resolving them..."

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• B-Eye: Open Source Software: Free and Open Source License Myths(Jan 15, 2006)
• B-Eye: Open Source Software and the Myth of Viral Licensing(Dec 16, 2005)
• Baseline: A New Program for the Enterprise(Aug 24, 2004)
• Rebuttals to Oz "Open Source Legal Warning"(Oct 30, 2002)