GPL Initiative Grows Over 40%; More Than 60 Companies Have Joined the Campaign for Greater Predictability in Open Source Licensing

Google Cloud also will disclose that Anthos on Microsoft Azure is being tested with customers and Anthos support for virtual machines is in early preview with customers.

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Camuda, Capital One, CloudBees, Colt, Comcast, Ellucian, Ericsson, EPAM Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Limited, Indeed, Infosys, Lenovo, LG Electronics, NetApp, Salesforce, Seagate Technology, and Volvo Car Corporation have joined an ongoing industry effort to combat harsh tactics in open source software license enforcement by adopting the GPL Cooperation Commitment. By making this commitment, these 17 corporate leaders are seeking to strengthen long-standing community norms of fairness, pragmatism, and predictability in open source license enforcement.

Today’s announcement follows several earlier waves of adoption of the commitment by other technology leaders. Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM led the way, first adopting the commitment in November 2017. They were joined in March 2018 by CA Technologies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, SAP and SUSE. In July 2018, 14 additional companies signed on to the commitment: Amazon, Arm, Canonical, GitLab, Intel Corporation, Liferay, Linaro, MariaDB, NEC, Pivotal, Royal Philips, SAS, Toyota and VMware. One month later, in August 2018, the eight founding members of the Open Invention Network (OIN) — Google, IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, Sony, NEC, Royal Philips, Toyota — announced that they had unanimously adopted the GPL Cooperation Commitment. In November 2018, Adobe, Alibaba, Amadeus, Ant Financial, Atlassian, Atos, AT&T, Bandwidth, Etsy, GitHub, Hitachi, NVIDIA, Oath, Renesas, Tencent, and Twitter joined the commitment.

With today’s announcement, more than 60 organizations have adopted the GPL Cooperation Commitment. The 17 new companies in today’s announcement are a diverse set of leading companies whose participation makes evident the worldwide reach of the GPL Cooperation Commitment. They comprise of globally operating companies and mark a significant expansion of the initiative. They represent a broad spectrum of businesses including cloud, semiconductor, computing hardware, enterprise software, telecommunications, financial services, automotive, and software consulting.

The GPL Cooperation Commitment is a means for copyright owners in GPL code to provide opportunities for their licensees to correct errors in compliance with software licensed under the GPLv2 family of licenses before taking action to terminate the licenses. Version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), version 2 of the GNU Library General Public License (LGPLv2), and version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv2.1) do not contain express "cure" periods to fix noncompliance prior to license termination. Version 3 of the GNU GPL (GPLv3) addressed this by adding an opportunity to correct mistakes in compliance before the licenses terminate. Those who adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment extend the cure provisions of GPLv3 to their existing and future GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x-licensed code.

EPAM’s Supporting Quote and Link to Commitment

Edward Rockwell, senior vice president and general counsel, EPAM Systems, Inc.
“At EPAM, we believe that open source is often a critical foundation to technological advancement that is both innovative and nimble yet also stable and secure. We are pleased to be part of the GPL Cooperation Commitment to support increased participation in the use and development of open source software. The transparent and collaborative nature of open source software development offers enterprise organizations enhanced flexibility and efficiency to build technology solutions to solve their dynamic business needs.”
https://www.epam.com/open-source/gpl-cooperation-commitment

The original article can be found here.