GPL and virality

[ihnorton]

At the risk of belabored internet-lawyering…

@jeffhammond

What this means is that GPL prevents certain types of research, particularly involving unreleased computer technology.

@jeffhammond

consequence of the GPL that has led to unintended disappointment by people who have chosen the GPL and then discover that it prevents them from collaborating with HPC vendors, as one example.

I know and appreciate that you have good intentions here, but this strikes me as very misleading. The link that you posted to the FSF page covers NDA in the context of distribution, which is always the context in which the responsibilities of the GPL are incurred (the AGPL is a somewhat different story, of course).

There is nothing in the GPL preventing author(s) who happen to have released code under GPL in the past – related or not – from entering in to a contract specifying, for example:

• the results of any work with unreleased hardware or specs shall not be publicly disclosed until a specific date. They can work on a private fork only accessible to others under NDA, exactly like direct employees, contractors, or collaborating authors of any proprietary or MIT-licensed library would, and only merge into the public tree after the agreed date.
• that they may not release incidental trade secrets gleaned in the course of research. By incidental, I mean outside the scope of code directly implementing – for example – support for the new hardware in a compiler (if the goal is not embodiment in code, for eventual release, then what would be the point?). You could even stipulate pre-release code review, though at the point they would basically be contractors, and hopefully compensated.

Now, it is entirely possible that some library authors object to such NDA obligations for philosophical reasons. It is also conceivable that your lawyers do not like or trust those damn dirty GPL-hippies, and so they come up with excuses to make the question go away (or they did do 20 years ago, and the policy stuck).

But both of those responses are unrelated to the legal implications of the GPL itself.

Here’s a concrete example of Red Hat and TI doing exactly what I mention above, to provide GCC support for new hardware.

(if I am misunderstanding the context here, please do clarify so that people don’t misinterpret the scope of your comments. the idea that “Intel’s lawyers believe X” carries significant weight, even 2nd-hand)