August 1st, 2005
Separating copyright and copyleft
Palamida and Black Duck both signed deals that, according to News.Com, assure that open source projects are not "polluted" by proprietary code.
Both deals are with the same sources — Eclipse and Sourceforge. Palamida and Black Duck will automate checks on these sources, and corporations will (supposedly) pay through the nose for the resulting assurance. Financial terms on the deals were not disclosed.
But here’s my point.
This should work both ways, and I hope those who manage open source code understand it. Most open source projects aren’t equipped with teams of lawyers. I’d love to see a super-team of lawyers, using these tools, riding herd on every proprietary software outfit out there to make sure no GPL code gets into their stuff, ever again.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
