Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA) wants to outlaw the GNU Public License in federal research. I wonder who told him to do that.

A clarification: "The letter's authors want the White House's national cybersecurity plan, due for completion next month, to ensure that companies that develop software using federal money are free to sell the resulting products for commercial gain. The letter made no mention of open-source software." It was Rep.-Adam-Smith-D-Wash.-whose-biggest- campaign-contributor-is-Microsoft's addendum to the letter (also signed by Ron Kind and Jim David) that slammed the GPL, which the letter's original author, Rep. Tom David (R-Va.), did not intend.

If by "commercial gain" they mean the companies developing the technology retain exclusive IP rights, as if they used private development funds and not public money, then the distinction is slight. The original letter is all about explicitly licensing to foster "public-private partnerships", and to vaguely insinuate that the GPL threatens commercial exploitation isn't much better than to come right out and say it. (Of course, I don't know anything about the current state of government-funded development of software, but I wouldn't assume it's all in the public domain... is it?)

More follow-up from Robin Miller: This message from Danese Cooper of Sun Microsystems says, "Many staffers of the 67 Congressman who signed [the letter] are now claiming they didn't know what they were signing and the letter is being withdrawn."

Supplemental: Adam Barr's account of Microsoft's use of TCP/IP briefly explains that FreeBSD's original TCP/IP code was released under the BSD license (an approved Open Source license), which has no requirements of license propagation or source distribution. Adam wrote a book on working for Microsoft, entitled "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years as a Microsoft Programmer".

Supplemental: Open Source Case for Business.