Network storage provider Wasabi Systems says that corporations may be violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act if they also violate the GNU General Public License (GPL). In the first of what will be a series of white papers, the company argues that GPL and Loadable Kernel Modules (LKM) may not be as lightly to take as Linux advocates think. Jay Michaelson, the white paper’s author, adds, "violating the Linux license is now a matter of federal securities law."

Linux products are generally covered under GPL which among other things mandates that the source code must be available. Violating the terms of GPL is usually not a big deal and the offending companies are generally made to merely release the code, but Wasabi says that Sarbanes-Oxley makes this much more complicated. Signed into federal law in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal, Sarbanes-Oxley - or SOX as many people call it - mandates that publicly traded corporations must audit and disclose their intellectual property to shareholders. Fines and even jail time can result from non-disclosure.

Michaelson says in his white paper called "Licensing 101" that companies that use GPL software may find themselves in legal trouble if the software doesn’t meet GPL standards. "If they don’t have the right to use the software, they’re violating federal law if they claim that they do," says Michaelson.

Loadable Kernel Modules can also be a danger and Michaelson calls them, "riskiest Linux bet of all". These modules are chunks of code that are executed after the main kernel is running. Usually the LKMs are for device drivers and in binary format to protect the original hardware manufacturers’ code. "Almost certainly [these] violate the GPL," says Michaelson and thusly if they violate GPL they would also violate SOX reporting standards.

Michaelson does not provide any solutions to the alleged issues with GPL or LKMs, but those might come in future white papers. Wasabi Systems sells BSD storage systems which, according to their website, "offer the rich functionality of BSD Unix without Linux’s troublesome GPL License."

Related Links

Wasabi Systems Licensing 101 Whitepaper

GPL Explanation

Loadable Kernel Modules explanation

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