I have been talking to some customers about Sun’s policy to publish Solaris as CDDL, and found that some of their staff are ‘balls out’ fans of the GPL; this places a duty to publish your source code if you have used GPL code and publish your binary. This is a very serious duty, and I am not sure these fans are getting management or their legal departments approval. The register reports that British Telecom have decided to publish their home appliance code because they feel that otherwise they may be in violation of the GPL since their home hub appliance uses Linux which is published under the GPL.

They are being hunted by http://gpl-violations.org/, whose page states

The ultimate goal is to make vendors of GPL licensed software understand that GPL is not public domain, and that there are license conditions that are to be fulfilled.

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in June 2016.

The duty to publish bites
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