“Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons
to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as
well as the extent to which they use it. These events are: (1) the
release of a new version of the widely used license that covers
such software, i.e., the General Public License version 3, and (2)
a round of lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center
against for-profit companies using the software for commercial
gain. Four companies to date, the largest of which is Verizon
Communications Inc., have been sued for violation of the GPL.“Although the lawsuits are not about changed provisions in the
GPL, both events are muscle-flexing by the free software community
and, taken together, may foreshadow new risks in the irreconcilable
conflict between open source software and its widespread use by
for-profit companies…”