Summary: Another new round of GPL scare, courtesy of OpenLogic

YAWN. It's happening again. Firms that monetise fear of something (be it cyberwar, Windows security problems^*, water/oil poisoning, or even GPL violation) are once again putting exaggerative press releases out there.

OpenLogic Survey Shows Enterprises Unknowingly Risk Violation of GPL

OpenLogic, a provider of enterprise open source software support and governance solutions for hundreds of open source packages, today announced the results of a survey that shows many companies are unaware that they may be distributing open source software, and thereby triggering critical "copyleft" provisions of open source licenses. Under copyleft provisions, companies may be required to open source code that they have written and combined with the open source program.

We have already given many examples (e.g. [1, 2]) where OpenLogic and Black Duck do this sort of thing. It's how they get clients; it's not a victimless act when the reputation of the GPL is at stake. Both OpenLogic and Black Duck happen to have gotten connections with Microsoft (OpenLogic's CEO is from Microsoft [1, 2] and Black Duck's founder is from Microsoft). ⬆

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

_____ ^* Anti-virus software companies sometimes exaggerate the threats of GNU/Linux, when in fact it is Windows that contains back doors to crackers. The following new report relates to an incident which was mentioned before in a separate post.

Hi-tech criminals are "escalating" attacks on an unpatched bug in the Windows XP help and support system.

Microsoft said it had seen more than 10,000 machines hit by the attack that, so far, it has not found a fix for.