This guest column by Wasabi Vice President and General Counsel Jay Michaelson responds to a reaction from Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eben Moglen to a Wasabi whitepaper that discussed potential interactions between Sarbanes-Oxley Act legislation and the GNU General Public License.
Wasabi is best-known for BSD-based embedded operating system stacks licensed under the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license, a less restrictive alternative to the GNU GPL (General Public License) used by Linux.
Unlike the GPL, the BSD license does not require modifications and enhancements to be contributed back to the community at large, a “feature” that has made the license popular in some commercial applications, while arguably limiting BSD-licensed softwares technical progress and adoption rates in comparison to Linux.
A “talkback” discussion thread linked at the end of Michaelsons column offers LinuxDevices readers a chance to voice their own opinions about GPL-SarbOx interactions, and about GPL versus BSD license issues in general.