CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE – have committed to extending additional rights to work in open source license noncompliance – Red Hat announced in a statement. This is expected to lead to greater cooperation with distributors of open source software to correct errors and increased participation in open source software development, says the company.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) are among the most widely used open source software licenses, covering software projects, including the Linux kernel. GPL version 3 (GPLv3) introduced an approach to termination that offers distributors of the code an opportunity to correct errors and mistakes in license compliance.

In Nov. 2017, Red Hat, Facebook, Google, and IBM each committed to extending the GPLv3 approach for license compliance errors to the software code each has contributed under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2. There are now ten companies that have publicly committed to providing greater predictability to open source users.

[Images courtesy: http://isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/]