Microsoft claims no GPL violation in Linux submission after all

David M Williams
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 17:30

Opinion and Analysis

Turning to Dave Roberts’ blog there is a generous serving of semantic sugar-coating but no actual rebuttal despite Ramji’s promise.

Roberts effectively says, “yes, Stephen Hemminger did post that initial blog entry. Yes, Stephen Hemminger did find Microsoft had linked closed source code with open source code. Yes, this is factual and the events described happened.”

Roberts then says that Stephen Hemminger is a good guy (and I’m sure he is) and he wasn’t trying to catch Microsoft out but simply solve a technical problem. He found a conflict and called Greg Kroah-Hartman at Novell and asked him to speak with Microsoft.

The thrust of Roberts’ argument is simply Vyatta did not “accuse” Microsoft of violating the GPL, in the sense Vyatta did not post blog entries mocking Microsoft or saying “gotcha!”

Rather, Vyatta discovered there was a licensing violation and took steps to educate Microsoft about it. There can be no doubt that this ultimately led to Microsoft’s submitting the source code to the Linux kernel. One clearly caused the other.

This whole denial then, by Microsoft, seems rather hollow. The “rebuttal” is anything but. It is merely a re-iteration that the events did happen, just Vyatta chose not to bask in triumph at discovering a Microsoft foible.

Nevertheless, the test for whether a license violation occurred is not based on the intentions of those who uncover it. It is based on the actions of the company that combined GPL code with proprietary code.

The “perception” of a license violation is not based on whether the people who discovered it were good guys but whether, simply put, the license was violated. Which it was. The so-called “rebuttal” Ramji refers us to actually confirms this happened.

So there you have it. I’m sorry, Microsoft. You did violate the GNU public license. The fact Stephen Hemminger at heart wanted to produce a great system instead of rubbing your nose in it is more a matter of good fortune than a wondrous reinvention of the license terms.