“After Redmond covered itself in glory by opening up the code,
it now looks like it may have acted simply to head off any
potentially embarrassing legal dispute over violation of the GPL.
The rest was theater.“As revealed by Stephen Hemminger – a principal engineer with
open-source network vendor Vyatta – a network driver in Microsoft’s
Hyper-V used open-source components licensed under the GPL and
statically linked to binary parts. The GPL does not permit the
mixing of closed and open-source elements.“This story emerged after Hemminger congratulated Microsoft on
its decision to release the driver to GPL. Microsoft announced the
move as part of a release of 20,000 lines of code to the GPL – an
open-source license it has historically hated.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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