These are real practices of the giant California vis-à-vis the GPL who are challenged. Indeed, the developer who wants to exploit the source code of software protected by this license must also redistribute its own source code under the same terms. This is the principle of copyleft, as opposed to copyright.
Florian Muller said then: "Google has copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 headers from the Linux kernel with software that automatically clears the annotations and other elements, and has the audacity to declare ( comment in each file) that the retrieved content is not "information can be protected by copyright". " Ie the content should be published under GPL copyleft.
The expert believes that while Google is trying to create confusion by adopting different licenses: GPL (for the Linux kernel), but also permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) authorizing the modification of source code without having to redistribute last or license owners.
Other experts have previously interested in such matter, including Professor Raymond Nimmer and lawyer Edward Naughton. All agree that these practices will accomplish nothing for the free software community. Indeed, if the court sided with Google, so the company "has found a way to separate the Linux open source community and to privatize it," says Naughton. If, however, these practices were to be condemned, then the whole ecosystem would be threatened because some components used by developers (Angry Birds, Flash Player) should be published under GPL. This means that the publication of source code could, in some cases may affect the economic model.
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