This guest column by Wasabi VP and General Counsel Jay Michaelson responds to a reaction from Free Software Foundation General Counsel Eban Moglen to a target=”new”>Wasabi whitepaper that discussed potential interactions between Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) legislation and the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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 software's technical progress and adoption rates, in comparison to Linux.

A “talkback” discussion thread linked at the end of Michaelson's column offers LinuxDevices readers a chance to voice their own opinions about GPL/SOX interactions, and about GPL v. BSD license issues in general.

 
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