GPL fever

In general, people in my company know very little about open-source software. Our legal department also spend a lot of time to keep people stay away from them. It caused a lot of attention when I introduced an open-source AES package in our reference firmware.

Recently, people are talking about GNU/Linux because some of our customers want us, not the department I work for, to switch from other commercial RTOS to it. My people are very worried about the reference firmware would be forced into open-source when we release it with GNU/Linux.

The license term, GPLv2 in specific, and the license model in the building of GNU/Linux created a very difficult situation for embedded system builders like us. In an low end, washing machine to cell phone, embedded system, you link everything together to create a single image as much as possible. Every part is essential in the distribution. Some contributors in GNU/Linux might think the whole package should be open-sourced. It is just not possible. We cannot afford to open up every source line we have written to our competitors.

The license model in GNU/Linux also let every contributor to file a law suite everywhere. We, as a commercial company, cannot afford that potential cost. It would be much easier if there exists some single licensing entity to negotiate with. The collective work of Linux is great, but it would be a nightmare to deal with when it comes to the legal issue.

I think it might be better if people can authorize some single entity when they contribute the code into GNU/Linux. Just like what MySQL/BSD does. It is still free and open, but we know who to pay if we, no matter what the reason is, want to embed it into a toothbrush, closesourced.