This guy (and his writings and his company) came up on an internal mailing list a while back, with people complaining about how he was bashing the GPL, etc. My reply then, and now, was that when you take into account his audience (companies that want to use an embedded OS in an appliance, and who don't want to make their own source code public) he's absolutely right. The BSD style licenses are much more business friendly than the GPL. I read the entire white paper. I found it to be biased, certainly, towards the concerns of embedded appliance manufacturers and sellers, but other than that, pretty much correct. His advice was pretty much right on as well.
Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adam Thornton Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 11:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Interesting? to those who are subject to SOX On Jan 19, 2006, at 9:53 AM, McKown, John wrote: > I haven't read the whitepaper, but the overview (link below) indicates > that the author feels that companies using software which violates the > GPL, may also be violating Sarbanes-Oxley as well. He specifically > mentions the habit that vendors have of binary only Kernel loadable > modules (think 3590 support on zSeries Linux). > > http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/18/wasabi_whitepaper_dangersofgpl/ And, gee, he works for a company that sells BSD appliances. Let's deconstruct this, shall we: "GPL! Booga booga booga Sarbanes-Oxley! Buy our BSD-licensed product! It's not GPL!" Feh. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
