I Want My GPL

by on October 21, 2005

James DeLong muses about Google’s motivation for cutting a deal with Sun, speculating that Google may be contemplating a switch to Solaris to avoid the obligations of the forthcoming GPL 3.0.

This is (to be euphemistic) a silly theory:

  • DeLong is misunderstanding what’s meant by “web services” in this context. The term doesn’t refer to Google’s human-accessible services like its search engine and email service. Rather, it refers to “services” made available to software. Google does offer those kinds of services through the Google APIs but at the moment those are a minor part of the company’s business.

    • SHARE:

    Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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