Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM to increase Predictability in Open Source Licensing

Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM have made efforts to promote additional predictability in open-source licensing, by committing to extend additional rights to cure open-source licence compliance errors and mistakes.

The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) are among the most widely-used open-source software licences, covering, among others, software, critical parts of the Linux ecosystem. When GPL version 3 (GPLv3) was released, it introduced an express termination approach that offered users opportunities to cure errors in licence compliance. This termination policy in GPLv3 provided a more reasonable approach to errors and mistakes, which are often inadvertent. This approach allows for enforcement of licence compliance that is consistent with community norms.

To provide greater predictability to users of open-source software, Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM each committed to extending the GPLv3 approach for licence compliance errors to the software code that each licences under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2.

Michael Cunningham, Eexecutive Vice-President and General Counsel, Red Hat, said, “We believe in promoting greater fairness and predictability in licence enforcement and the growth of participation in the open-source community. We encourage other GPLv2 copyright holders to follow our lead.”

Allen Lo, Vice-President & Deputy General Counsel, Facebook, said, “Open source accelerates the pace of innovation in the world. Extending the good-faith opportunity for developers to correct errors in license compliance has the potential to help move the industry forward and allow engineers to focus on building great things.”

Mark Ringes, Assistant General Counsel, IBM, said, “For many years, General Public Licence v2 and V3 have guided the development of the world’s largest shared code base, Linux. Extending GPLv3’s non-compliance cure provision to GPLv2 will enable the continued adoption and robust growth of Linux for decades to come. IBM has long been a leading supporter of Linux and open source and assists in the development of the Linux kernel. Deepening our commitment with this assertion is a natural evolution of that support.”