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Google should share code, feels open-source advocate

Companies like Google that build their business on software such as Linux have a moral imperative to contribute back to the free software community, felt Eben Moglen, a Columbia university professor and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center during a speech at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on May 22.

Software that is licensed under General Public License can be freely copied and changed, but anyone who distributes the code must then publicly release their modifications under the same license. This means that companies like Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. must give back all of their Linux code to the community. But not so for Google or Yahoo Inc., considered two of the largest Linux users. Although their Web-based software is used by hundreds of millions of people, these companies are service providers, not software distributors.

Moglen said that community pressure -- and not software licenses -- would most likely drive Google's continued contributions to GPL projects. “They have ethical and community responsibilities to return at least those modifications that are not critical to their business and that are of general value to the community,” Moglen said.

Google is already a contributor to many open source projects, including Linux, but some observers say that it could be doing more.

[ Via Computerworld ]

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