>One problem is that large commercial programs are made by large teams
>of programmers. Some of these programmers may not understand the problems
>they may cause by including GPL'ed code. The companies legal department
>probably doesn't look through the source code.
>
>Now this company has released a commercial program that *should* have been
>GPL'ed.
>
>What should happen if they are "caught"?
>
>I would say that if the original GPL'ed code is a small part, that the
>company should just rewrite it. There are other opinions on this. I'm
>a moderate. The GPL was written by somebedy much less moderate (great
>piece of work, however).
>
>

The actual resolution of every case to date has either been that the
company released the code they were required to, OR they rewrote and
removed the offending piece of code.  There have not been any court
cases on the GPL to date, because once pointed out it was ususally
pretty easy to settle the issue.

In cases where it is the "rogue" programmer, I would bet that most of
them are not caught - how easy is it to see if they included say the GPL
malloc routine in an embedded product???  Those that are caught it is
easy enough to just remove the offending code and replace it with
something else - it was after all only the work of one programmer.

In cases where it isn't easy to replace the code because it is such a
large portion of the code - then it can not be claimed that they company
didn't know.  If say 25% or more of your code comes from an outside
source and you don't analyze the legal ramifications of using that code
then you are negligent in your duties as a software
engineer/manager/director/etc.  Those companies that used GPL code as
the basis for most of their product and then claim that they "didn't
know" are full of ......

Analyzing the legal ramifications doesn't have to include a lawyer -
although that might not be a bad idea in unusual circumstances.  If you
understand the GPL or BSD or Artistic or whatever license and are ok
with it - then you don't need to go re-review it with a lawyer every
time.  I think that people jump at needing a lawyer.  If you are not
trying to do something to screw someone else chances are you will be
just fine.  Act with good intent and carry some insurance to cover the
cases where some jack*** comes after you.  You can't stop those guys who
will sue anyway - so why waste time and money worrying about it.

The GPL has been around for decades and is very well understood by many
people, not to mention it is very readable and understandable for non
lawyers.  Even though RMS is not a moderate when it comes to his
definition of free software - he and the FSF can not sue you for
compliance with the GPL for most of the GPL code out there.  The GPL is
just a license given with the code, but the original author still
retains the original copyright and they are the only ones allowed to sue
to enforce those rights.  The FSF believes it is a good idea for authors
to assign their copyright to the FSF so that the FSF can sue if needed,
but it is not required.  The split between Xemacs and emacs is mostly
because the Xemacs people choose to use GPL code that did not have it's
copyright assigned to the FSF, where emacs was run by the FSF and they
would not allow code to be included unless the authors assigned their
copyright to them.  So a fork in the code base was created - and now we
have two editors that are both very good.

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