McAfee's silly hypocrisy over open-source licensing

McAfee is warning its investors that "ambiguous" open-source license terms are a threat to its business in its latest annual report, as noted on Slashdot. What's the problem? As InformationWeek reports:

McAfee said it's particularly troubling that the legality of terms included in the GNU/General Public License -- the most widely used open source license -- have yet to be tested in court.

This is a massive pile of rubbish. When was the last time your proprietary vendor's license was tested in court? The answer would be "Never" in virtually every case, and there are far more proprietary licenses out there than open-source licenses.

I think McAfee knows exactly what is expected of it with open-source licenses like the GPL. It just doesn't want to comply with them. It wants the software but not on the software's license terms. That's its problem, not the license's.

Updated: Thinking through this some more, are we going to start to see more proprietary vendors throwing around this canard as a way to spook customers? We shall see....

[smkatz]

good article.

[theopensourcerer]

Of course the GPL HAS been tested several times in the very recent past and has come out on top every time. Although IIRC the settlements were eventually achieved "out-of-court" the cases were being pursued through the legal system.

The businesses being brought-to-book had a choice; they could have fought but I guess they knew they'd lose.

Also bear in mind that the GPL v3 was created in a true Open Source fashion itself, and it was scrutinised by many a keen eye. I suspect it is as good as, and probably a darn sight better than, many of the ludicrous proprietary EULAs that exist and no-one really understands...

[sepreece]

Certain limited aspects of the GPL have been tested in court. There are still big areas where different people have radically different interpretations (notably, the issue of kernel modules and what makes a derivative work). Until there is a real litigation of some of those issues, there is some real uncertainty there.

Why on earth would McAffee want to "spook customers"? This is in their annual report - it's corporate lawyers saying "We're not sure that this couldn't end up forcing us to expose more of our code than we want to, which might have some cost to us, so we're better warn stockholders." Companies DO get sued for not exposing possible issues that they can be proven to have thought about.

So, yes, I expect you'll see lots of major software companies saying something like this, to cover their ass if a court someday sides with the more aggressive readings of the GPL.