March 18, 2008 6:00 AM PDT
The GPL is a capitalist's best friend
Ah! Finally some intelligence on the GNU General Public License (GPL). John Mark Walker says something that few seem to understand, yet it's so simple (and true):
No, the GPL does not cede your intellectual property to the public domain - as a matter of fact, it does a pretty good job of protecting it. In fact, the GPL is a pretty good compromise between granting rights to all parties and protecting IP.
The GPL is probably the best license ever devised for protecting one's intellectual property. The GPL simply protects through transparency and openness, not opacity and closed doors. Many of the industry's most successful open-source vendors use the GPL for this very reason.
Richard Stallman. A capitalist for the 21st Century.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
