The Open source legal maze: an open trap?

“Five minutes after first looking at open source, I found myself
on the phone with a lawyer.

“When people talk about open source, they use words like “free”
and all these other wonderful terms; when I spoke to the lawyer, he
described the idiosyncrasies of all these open source legal
licenses. That’s when I became familiar with less wonderful words
-— medical terms like infectious and viral—that open
source licenses often use.

“For example: The Gnu Public License (GPL) says if you write any
software that touches the licensed code, your software immediately
becomes open source. That’s called being infectious. Candidly, it
does make you feel sick a little bit.”

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