I've bashed Microsoft (here and in other publications) for their Shred Source licensing scheme, whereby Microsoft gets to decided how much of your source code is yours. Well, now I have to turn that criticism against Open Source.
If you force corporations to give away their competitive edge then they don't make money. On the other hand, I'd like a little more detail on what companies are supposed to be giving up. I'm no lawyer, but the standard C libraries are L-GPL, meaning anything they developed solely off of those should not fall under the "return to the community" heading. Most libraries are licensed the same way.
Even assuming my reasoning is legally right in this case (a stretch since courts bewilder me daily), eventually the problem of enforcing the GPL will arise. Maybe a license fee to put off disclosure of modifications to GPL source would not be a bad idea...
Let me know what you think. I'm in a quandry on this one. If you say "they should sue" then you're turning the FSF into another licensing organization -- a smart company will pay rather than give back source they consider part of their "competitive advantage." If you say "this is Open Source, they shouldn't sue" then you're saying that contributors can bust their tails turning out quality OSS products, and companies can just take them and rebrand them with no credit - like they do with FreeBSD.
Someone, somewhere has a good idea to resolve this. Probably as good an idea as the GPL was in the first place. If you're that person, we're waiting to hear from you.
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