Free Software Center believes that the European Commission underestimated the GPL when analyzing an Oracle deal with Sun
Representatives of the human rights organization Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) sent a letter to the European Commission stating that the latter had underestimated the “strength of the GPL”. The letter was a response to concerns expressed by the European Commission about the lack of protection from the GPL license in matters of competition arising from the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The document was sent at the request of Oracle's attorney and will be included in the response to the latter at the hearing scheduled for December 10.
As Eben Moglen, head of SFLC, a law professor at Columbia University and a lawyer at the Free Software Foundation, said: “The GPL was specifically designed to ensure software freedom and the ability for everyone to improve it, regardless of who owns the copyright to the code. The main purpose of the license is to eliminate unforeseen risks that may lead to the destruction of code freedom. The compilers of the GNU GPL versions 2 and 3 looked at situations similar to the one that the European Commission is now concerned about. The idea of the license, as well as the accumulated experience of using the GPL, show that the European Commission can count on the proper functionality of the license in situations like this. ”
Programs released under the GPL, including the Linux kernel, Samba and GCC have proven to be resistant to anti-competitive behavior on the market. "GPL-programs effectively competed with the proposals of the richest and most powerful monopolies in the history of information technologies, resisting the efforts of the latter to find vulnerabilities in their licensing protection," says Moglen.
As Eben Moglen, head of SFLC, a law professor at Columbia University and a lawyer at the Free Software Foundation, said: “The GPL was specifically designed to ensure software freedom and the ability for everyone to improve it, regardless of who owns the copyright to the code. The main purpose of the license is to eliminate unforeseen risks that may lead to the destruction of code freedom. The compilers of the GNU GPL versions 2 and 3 looked at situations similar to the one that the European Commission is now concerned about. The idea of the license, as well as the accumulated experience of using the GPL, show that the European Commission can count on the proper functionality of the license in situations like this. ”
Programs released under the GPL, including the Linux kernel, Samba and GCC have proven to be resistant to anti-competitive behavior on the market. "GPL-programs effectively competed with the proposals of the richest and most powerful monopolies in the history of information technologies, resisting the efforts of the latter to find vulnerabilities in their licensing protection," says Moglen.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/77462/
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