General Public License violates constitution, copyright laws

eWeek | at | by Mike

The open-source community is rallying against comments made by The SCO Group CEO Darl McBride late last month that the GPL, under which Linux and open-source software is distributed, violates the U.S. Constitution as well as copyright and patent laws.

McBride created a furor last month when he wrote: "We believe that adoption and use of the GPL [GNU General Public License] by ... the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat [Inc.] against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws."