BusinessWire: ‘Viral’ Open-Source License Can Destroy Software’s Value

“‘Your employee could grab a piece of open-source code off the
Internet and you no longer have a proprietary product. Your $50,000
software package is now worth zero,’ Steve Henry, a senior
intellectual property lawyer with Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks,
P.C., told the Software Business 2003 Conference in Boston.

“This ‘time bomb’ lurks because a popular license for open
source, the GNU General Public License, (GPL) is ‘viral.’ The
license attaches to any product with GPL-licensed code, including a
derivative work, he said. The entire software package becomes open
source and the company thus must distribute it freely and let
anyone copy it. A widely used open-source utility, for instance,
could ‘infect’ hundreds of software products and destroy their
commercial value…”

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