More Proof That People Don’t Understand OSS Licensing

It is incredible to me that despite all the publicity and sexiness of open source, the majority of people still dont understand how open source licenses work. Despite the good work of most folks in attempting to explain the key differences between Apache/BSD-style licenses, GPL licenses, and others, I get the impression that a lot of developers out there treat open source as some sort of no-strings-attached code resource. Want to use GPL library in your code? Easy… abide by the license, or find another alternative.

Case in point. Slashdot reported this morning that the game ICO, an excellent (if moderately popular) game for the Playstation 2, contains GPL code in the form of libarc and zlib. In both cases, they are pieces of both of these libraries with modifications. Nonetheless, it suggests to me that the developer of the game was relying on the idea that it’s actually quite hard/impossible/illegal to dissasemble a game binary to hide their use of open source code. Perhaps there wasnt any malice here, and the developer(s) simply didnt know about the terms of use of this code. Regardless, it makes me wonder how many other places this is happening. Not just in games, but also in all kinds of other software.

I personally dont believe that all software should be open source. That’s a matter of choice for the developer of the software. However, the prospect of having people ripping OSS projects off by taking their code (as has happened even in our own segment of the industry) and packaging it up without abiding by the license is… well… crap. It’s something I recall Marc Fleury from JBoss being quite vocal about in the past… the idea that open source developers shouldnt get ripped off.

Too bad not many people cared about ICO. I bet if it was a higher profile game, this’d be bigger news.

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