“Microsoft violated the GPLv2 when it distributed its Hyper-V Linux Integration Components without providing source code, says the Software Freedom Law Center. The violation was rectified when Microsoft contributed more than 20,000 lines of source code to the Linux community last week. The drivers are designed to improve the performance of the Linux operating system when it is virtualized on the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor-based virtualization system.”
Man, I’m drooling to see what steveb will have to say about this when someone asks him about MS violating the GPL.
And will he ever claim about us GNU/Linux users stealing their IP with a straight face?
Well, he *could* say that the GPL code floating around is a trap just waiting to close upon any company which distributes software. This is not a coup for GPL. This is a demonstration of the very thing that MS has FUD’d about in the past. This is their concrete example of “GPL is cancer”. Careful. Don’t choke on your popcorn.
Somehow, though, I suspect that today, in 2009, he will not say those things.
Edited 2009-07-28 22:52 UTC
On the contrary, any open source license can be violated. If you want to use someone else’s code, whether that code is open source, GPL, BSD, Apache, or proprietary, you need to follow the rules for doing so. If you break the rules, you are infringing copyright. Large companies have legal staffs to deal with these matters.
GPLv2 is a shorter, simpler license than many of the others (e.g. Mozilla’s license, or Apache’s). It’s not that hard.
True. But please condense all that down to something as catchy and quotable as “GPL is cancer”.
And, of course, only GPL comes right out talking about giving away your source code.
Edited 2009-07-28 23:01 UTC
Well, he could *try* to claim that the GPL is cancer … but anyone with the tiniest ounce of sense could see right through him. The GPL didn’t “infect” Microsoft’s code, but rather Microsoft themselves took already-GPL’ed code and tried to re-distribute it within their own closed-source HyperV product.
Naugthy naughty, Steve B.
If it had been the reverse, and some Linux distribution had tried to ship some Microsoft-written code within it, Steve B and lawyers would have been all over them like a nasty rash.
Interestingly, what Microsoft actually did was try to claim that they had always intended to release this code under the GPL v2.
Edited 2009-07-29 03:38 UTC
True, GPL is not cancer. GPL is HIV.
You innocently link with another program for fun and next thing you know you are forever infected and with no hope of ever being clean again.
Sorry, but you analogy doesn’t apply. In software, static linking with any outside code (GPL licensed or not) means that you include that external code within you own product.
In order to do this leaglly, one would have to comply with the license terms of the external code no matter what they were … the GPL itself has nothing whatsoever to do with this, as this requirement is just plain copyright law. There is even a term for it in the text of copyright law … it is called “derivative works”. Within copyright law definitions, this term means any work that includes part or all of an earlier copyrighted work.
Look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
Under this definition, in law, Microsoft’s HyperV product is a derivative work of the GPL code it includes within. Therefore, under the law of copyright, Microsoft is required to obtain permission from the authors of that GPL’d code before Microsoft may use it in HyperV.
The authors terms for allowing this are conveniently pre-explained to Microsoft in a document called “GPL v2”.
Edited 2009-07-29 05:01 UTC
That’s what I was gonna say.
Sorry, but that is not true.
Once you remove all bits of originally GPLed code from your product, you no longer need to abide by the GPL, as your work no longer is derived from a GPLed work.
If you use a GPLed library, all you have to do is taking a not-GPLed library with similar functionality or write your own library.
In case of Microsoft, all they would have needed to do is write a clean-room, binary compatible replacement for Linux which does not contain any GPLed code.
And Microsoft is still having this option.
In this case, I suspect that both stories we have heard are true. It’s obvious that Microsoft wants Linux to run well under their HyperV product, just as with all the OSes it supports. So the Linux integration kit, or whatever it was called was, indeed, good for Microsoft’s customers. It would have been a lot of extra trouble go the NVidia route and insulate their code from GPL. And there was no particular reason not to release the not-particularly-valuable source. So it seems likely that they (someone, somewhere in Microsoft) did intend to release it.
On the other hand, as we have seen countless times before, companies which intend to release their code to fulfill copyleft obligations, often leave that till last, and then other projects get in the way, and they require a little prodding before they get around to doing the right thing.
It looks to me like that is what happened here. It’s just that this time the company was Microsoft. In a way, the most interesting thing about this incident is how uninteresting it is. Meaning that MS releasing GPL’d code for good reason in 2009 is not really an earth shattering event once one puts it all in perspective.
PJ, of the Groklaw site, http://groklaw.net/ has a view on this possibility:
PJ lost her grasp on reality a long time ago. It’s hard to put a date on it, but I think it happened about the time that Maureen O’Gara was spying on her.
Given that they did want to write Linux kernel code for the benefit of their customers, why would Microsoft want to intentionally violate the license? Maybe if they had some plan to attack the GPL in court. But is that happenening? No, it is not. This is the same phenomenon as with the router manufacturers that just didn’t get around to publishing code like the one in the company who made the decision to use it intended to.
Despite all the handwaving to the contrary, OSS licenses are easier to make mistakes with. Because any employee can grab the code and use it, fully intending to comply with the license, and then that can drop through the cracks later. With proprietary code, the process is generally much more formal. All the arrangements are made up front and in an official manner. The informal nature, and easy availability of OSS code means that instances of violation are going to be more common.
Sometimes a rose is just a rose.
P.S. Your being a Groklaw reader explains much about your particular brand of “informed insanity”.
Edited 2009-07-29 13:00 UTC
I think microsoft knew they violated the GPL, and still tried to get away with it.
Everything else just makes no sense.
If they wanted to release it under the GPL already months ago, why not just do it.
And if they needed to do licensing deals with other companies in order to be able to release under the GPL, why releasing at all before the deal is done. It just puts you into a VERY bad negotiation position, which is not something Microsoft is known for.
I think, they looked at the closed source graphics drivers and tried to do something similar, but overlooking the obvious fact, that NVIDIA and ATI found an elegant way around the GPL, using a seperately compilable glue code between the kernel and their driver. Since the drivers themselves are no derivative work of Linux, and the glue-code is LGPLed AND compiled by the user, any GPL violations actually happen at the users computer. No likely target for getting a legal letter from the Linux developers.
Don’t you know? It’s part of their secret plot to destroy Linux by…uh…release code under the GPL…. Ok, so I’m not entirely sure how all that conspiracy logic goes but I’m sure it’s true. I mean, it’s MS. It’s must be evil. They’re not warm, friendly companies like IBM who’d never hurt a fly.
Edited 2009-07-29 09:45 UTC
Where did you get this from?
Quote please.
Have you undergone any cranial surgery recently? If so, I’m guessing they removed the part of your brain responsible for recognizing irony and humor.
Edited 2009-07-29 13:04 UTC
Wow, a down mod so soon? Thanks for proving me right!
I can see it now: some greasy freetard in his mommy’s basement reading my comment and thinking to his/her/itself “OMG how dare he?!?!? Time to vent my impotent rage by modding his post down, that’ll teach him!”
Hahaha,
– BallmerKnowsBest
Friend lemur tends to be so “white-knuckle” about these topics that he sometimes misses obvious humor. (Unless, perhaps, *his* post is intended to be humorous, in which case I’m the one with the humor impairment.)
But shame on you for your next, name-calling post, BKB. It deserves to be modded down to about -25. The moral high ground opened up and swallowed you on that one. That’s no way to act here on OSAlert.
BKB’s original post was the one intended to elicit an angry response.
BKB was the only poster who has ended up actually posting any angry responses.
I thought it all worked out pretty well. I can easily endure people ranting at me claiming that I lack a sense of humour if it uncovers their true colours like this.
There is plenty of OSS in the corporate development world now, and it is considered to be a Good Thing. I think people are leaning more towards a BSD-ish license then the GPL, but it does not have the same connotations it did ten years ago.
Redmond has this isolation thing that happens to people who work for MS, where they just stop looking at what anyone is doing outside of the company. The newer generation of employees are bringing that acceptance of OSS into the company though, which is why you see them releasing source code now when they didn’t before, and actually accepting patches for select products.
As it stands now, their big fear is code ownership. They don’t want to say, accept a patch into a .net library, and find that the person who submitted the patch didn’t actually own the code, and suddenly lose ownership of the entire .net framework and open themselves up to lawsuits. Typically, the rules for accepting patches is you have to be a project that is not going to ship with a major product. So IronRuby will accept patches, since it will always be an additional download. The DLR will not accept patches, since it is going to ship with .net 4.0.
Now, here is the kicker. This is MS Legals greatest fear, that they lose ownership of code, and are open to lawsuits. I would imagine this is going to cast a shadow over the novell partnership, and will also give the people who are against open source in the company ammo against the people who are pro open source. And who knows, maybe this will give Ballmer a reason to open his big mouth about the cancerous nature of the GPL again and cause another big bout of nerd rage among the slashdotters again. I am glad they actually released the code, but I wish that it wasn’t under the impetus of impeding doom.
Nail on the head. When MS funds development of some major feature in the kernel, that will be worthy of shock. This is good to see, but not even remotely in the same ballpark