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The article starts off reasonably. The first sentence pulls you in, describing the case you fear most: you have "inadvertently" incorporated GPL code into your

• SwellJoe 16y ago
  More FUD. "If I inadvertently infringed, I might have peppered that GPL code throughout miles of my own code." Really? You "inadvertently" used miles of code copyrighted by other people without bothering to understand the license under which you obtained said code? That's a stretch. Even if you don't understand the GPL, as a developer with knowledge enough to locate the code you must understand that copyrighted code is probably made available to you under some terms that you must comply with. Whether you buy a license to use the code, or received a license for free, you can't possibly be a computer programmer with zero notion of what "license" or "copyright" means. "Just saying, the article seems to confirm that the FUD isn't FUD after all." The FUD is that once you've introduced GPL code into your software, no matter how small a piece or for what reason, you could be forced to GPL all of your proprietary code. That's simply not true. If, on the other hand, you used so much GPL code that your product can't exist without it and you can't possibly rewrite the violating code, and you did so without putting forth any effort to understand or comply with the license under which you received the code, the best result I can think of would be for your company to go out of business.
  • hughw 16y ago
    Don't address these rhetorical questions to me, using me as a straw man. I didn't assert people are spreading FUD about "inadvertent" infringement. The author did.The author uses "inadvertently" right in the first sentence, as the very premise of the article. So get out of my face with your lecturing. It's all there in the first sentence of the article. : his definition of "FUD" , the "inadvertent" infringing premise. My criticism is that the article fails as a self contained piece of reasoning. It convinces me the FUD spreaders could be right.
    • jbri 16y ago
      You don't "inadvertently" spread GPL'd code all throughout your codebase, unless you're one of those people who just copy-paste code from the internet everywhere.
      • hughw 16y ago
        And your point is, people shouldn't do that? Well, you're not convincing me that the GPL doesn't spread virally and inadvertently then.
        • jbri 16y ago
          If all you've done is copy-paste stuff from the internet everywhere, then you haven't actually written any code. Regardless, that's not the point. Including GPL code doesn't magically obligate you to release the rest of your source code free to the world - you always have the option of, say, not distributing your program until you've removed and rewritten all the GPL-licensed stuff. I'm really not sure what you're getting at with your 'viral and inadvertent' comment - it almost seems like you're willfully ignoring the points being made in reply to your comments.
          • hughw 16y ago
            The responses all have the theme, "Inadvertent? Who would do that? Only irresponsible ninnies would do that." So they ignore the premise of the article, which presumes that inadvertent inclusion does happen. Additionally, I posted a few examples below where otherwise responsible contributors to a codebase might leak some GPLd material into the codebase. Over a long enough time, with enough developers contributing to your codebase, it's inevitable. "Not distributing your program", for a business, may mean a lot of money. It might mean bankruptcy. How do you know it will be affordable to replace the offending code? The author said "inadvertent", not "tiny". That's the viral part. GPL source code is all over the net. Any developer on your staff could look at something on line and derive some code from it, and drop it into your codebase. You'll never know about 99.9% of it.
• rbanffy 16y ago
  How many programmers you know would accidentally include GPL'ed code into proprietary apps that get sold to other people? Is there any documented case of such accident?
  • hughw 16y ago
    I think, a lot. Here's a nifty little FFT code. Hey FFT's are kind of generic, right? This one's only 40 lines of C. I'll just copy and paste this one little function. Nobody'll ever know. Or maybe nothing so complex as an FFT. Maybe it's a little code for charting. Who knows. Developer picks it up a snippet off the net somewhere, and it appears in your code base. Then there's "derived works". Developer uses some working code snippet as a starting point, transforms it, specializes it, does a lot of work to it, but it's still derived work. I don't think developers think of it as plagiarism. Just "freedom". ;) But developers don't always protect the best interests of the company.
    • rbanffy 16y ago
      There is no excuse to simply copy someone else's code without some kind of permission, be it a charting tool, be it a CFD library. If the code is under a BSD-ish license, it's fine to use it. If it's GPL-ish, the developer wants me to honor his conditions and, so, that's what I'll do. Developers should care about freedom, but also for respecting the will of the developers that built their materials.
      • protomyth 16y ago
        If it's BSD the developer also still wants you to follow the license and abide by it's terms. The BSD still has terms that need to be followed.
        • jasonlotito 16y ago
          Which people seem to forget. Copy paste BSD code into your GPL app and you run into the same problems if you include GPL code into a BSD app.