Posts by nowave7 5 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2018
I guess that some companies must use some GPLed libraries in their applications' source code, because, well, it's already there, and does exactly what they need it to do, why reinvent the wheel? And for not wanting to release the source code, they probably rely on FOSS advocates not taking them to court because of the sheer costs of such a process. But this is just speculation on my part.
Careful with that, it also depends heavily on the libraries your app uses, linkage type, as well as development/build/deployment tools. Funny thing is, Microsoft uses or at least used some BSD network code in windows, and even though the BSD license used for the code is much more permissive than that of Linux(GPL 2.0) it still stipulates that the header of the license be included in the binary itself. Microsoft had no problems with that, of course. They duly included the license text in their final binary.
It's quite ironic when you think about it. Using FOSS, something that is intended to empower the end-user, make them able to adapt the code to their needs, and then subverting it, twisting it, and ultimately using it to do the quite opposite of the original intent, and lock down the entire system. Deere is definitely not the only company doing this, but probably the most infamous one.
All "Linux" comes under these terms. Because there's only one Linux. Let's not confuse a couple of things here. Strictly speaking, Linux kernel is just one component in the entire Linux based system. But with the kernel alone, you can't really do much. The kernel itself comes with GPL2.0, the rest of the system doesn't have to. There are literally tens of compatible licenses, that are even more permissive in nature than GPL, like some variations of MIT or BSD licenses. With these, one can completely close the source code, not publish it, and there's nothing any litigation can do about it. Luckily GPL is not one of these (though 2.0 isn't that strict as the new 3.0 is, and is still the license of choice if you ask Linus), and all FOSS organizations should really be litigating against such companies that break the license agreements and we as users should support them however we can in that endeavor.
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