The GPL vs. Skype: Open source's bedrock license wins again
Groklaw is reporting that Skype has given up on its appeal against a lower German court's ruling that the GPL is enforceable, thank you very much. Skype had considered appealing on the grounds that the GPL inhibits (???) free trade, but a few minutes of serious reflection must have caused the Skype attorneys to realize that would be one of the dumbest possible arguments to make against the GPL. As one court already found:
The GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access, and more innovation.
Indeed.
It seems to me (and to Glyn) that so long as the defenders of the GPL are motivated by defense of the GPL, there's roughly zero chance that this bedrock open-source license is going to fade away. One may prefer Apache-style licensing, but it is the GPL that provides the foundation for all other open-source licenses.
The GPL, like Ionesco's Rhinoceros, "ne capitule pas" (won't capitulate). So long as we have a strong and vibrant GPL community, we'll have a strong and vibrant open-source community. It really is as simple as that.
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. 
There are plenty of Open Source licenses that are nothing whatsoever to do with the GPL; BSD, for instance, or the MIT license, or for that matter the Perl Artistic license, all of which are used in prominent software packages and in some case for entire operating systems.
Support the GPL, or not, as you please, but don't insult our intelligence with this drivel.
Simple as that.
- by ivorycruncher May 9, 2008 8:00 AM PDT
- The GPL (Gnu Public License) is one of the most popular open-source software licenses available. Needless to say there's a lot of legalese involved, but the basic gist of it is that any software licensed with the GPL must be distributed with the original source code. Anybody else can take the source code, modify it, and redistribute it again, as long as they too include the modified source code, and note the changes made to it. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on some point here. As for Skype not offering any hardware, you'd probably have to ask them. I have not used it, but I was under the assumption that it was more of a video chat/messenger system, like instant messaging but with audio and voice capabilities. I'm not sure if it would be feasible to tie it to a hardware device at this point, since it's not a true VoIP system like Vonage. There are devices available that let you tie your landline handsets into Skype on your computer, but it still requires a Windows PC to be running with the Skype client logged in. You could, of course, setup a small PC like a server that could serve as nothing more than a conduit to Skype for your landline phones. But setting all that up and maintaining it would require some technical knowledge.
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