Changes

A lot of people seem to bury their head in the sand as the issue gets complicated. For a long time (and it still continues), the GPL was viewed as bad and labelled "viral" because if you let GPL code touch your proprietary code, you'll be forced to share your proprietary code. That's only half true. Articles like [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-consultant/legal-considerations-when-using-free-software-in-it-consulting-projects/ this one] talk about this viral nature, but don't even touch on the other half of the story: what triggers the license. You have to "distribute" software to trigger the GPL, so if all you ever do is use the software (plus GPL additions) for your own internal purposes, then you have all the right in the world to use GPL software without having to publish your software to the world. Of course some people recognized that they could skirt the line by making "services" out of predominantly free software (e.g. an online logo generator that uses the [[GIMP]] as a backend.) Thus, the Free Software Foundation drafted the GPLv3 as a way to define network transmission of services tantamount to distributing the software. The GPLv3 license has not been as popular as the GPLv2, but at least it's there for software developers to use when they want to prevent their creations to get from getting boxed up in the cloud. Ultimately, using GPL software in your (commercially available and distributed) product is not different than using some other (proprietary) software -- you have to have need the right to do it. GPL says you don't have that right unless you're willing to share. You don't want to share, then build it yourself. In-house counsel was often focused exclusively on this viral aspect and the "FOSS governance" and created policies to restrict that grew out of it were focused on restricting what could come in-bound to an organization. Their contracts still had the mindset that they weren't using GPL software anywhere in their organizations, including the mundane and operations related areas of the business that would never cross the "distribution" threshold. To be clear, you can -- and LOTS millions of companies do -- use Drupal for an internal website, or MediaWiki for a knowledgebase. You can even modify or extend that code to do things you need it to do. And you don't have to share your code if you don't want to.

The issue we're trying to focus on here and that nobody is addressingvery few address, is that a '''majority''' of companies not only use free software, but need commercial support for that software. They frequently want to build that extra feature or just need help deploying, integrating, upgrading and documenting it. It's not a core product. It's just some internal thing to get work done. Take for example a simple PHP application used for keeping track of Time Off, using a MySQL database backend. Should a company "own" the intellectual property associated with upgrading MySQL? It may actually be counter to the law. An author only has rights to the specific pieces of expression that they've contributed to a collaborative work so they can't claim ownership over the whole thing.