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Openness of GNU Scaring Away Businesses?

By Casey Houser, Contributing Writer

The GNU General Public License, or GPL, is a free software license that allows end users the ability to use, share, and modify the software. It has become a staple of many organizations' software packages, and as Infoworld has pointed out, it has become important to the functioning of many IT departments.

Businesses small and large are not strangers to the license. At times, they use it readily to save costs and expand the development and end user adoption of their software. However, at other times, businesses can become hesitant to fully adopt the GPL because of certain ramifications that inherently follow its use. Infoworld makes it known that one of the biggest hurdles to GPL adoption is its need for reciprocity.

"Any software that's derived from software licensed under the GPL and released for public consumption must also be GPL-licensed," the tech news site suggests, "and it must have the source code readily available."

This becomes a difficult pill to swallow for enterprises that have intellectual property they like to keep secret. As the first version of a company's software grows outward and upward, derivatives can potentially expose such intellectual property, and the company will have no control over that. In response to that possible situation, the company in question may choose to avoid the GPL altogether.

Infoworld quotes Saïd Ziouani, CEO of Ansible, about the legal issues surrounding this problem.

"Anything that looks like risk to an enterprise lawyer can be a barrier for enterprise adoption," Ziouani said.

Therefore, even the mention of risk could cause a business to shy away from the GPL in favor of a more restrictive license that will provide more security for its asset, the intellectual property it guards so dearly.

"All open source licenses have some risk, but it's becoming clear that projects licensed under the GPL and other copyleft licenses are perceived as having higher risk," Ziouani continued.

The final point the article makes is that the GPL is perhaps better than no license at all. However, with a glut of licenses to choose from in the corporate sphere, any responsible legal and IT team will be able to find something that suits its level of protectiveness.