POPULAR OPEN SOURCE virus scanner Clamav has been hastily updated this morning to remove a 'false positive': the scanner was detecting the GNU Public Licence as a virus. Thousands of Open Source programs, including Clamav itself, include a copy of this licence, and since it is a plain text file it is incapable of containing a virus.
The incident may well bring a smirk to the lips of those who object to the GPL on ideological grounds. The cry is often heard that the GPL is 'viral', since you can't redistribute GPL code with proprietary code without the result being 'infected' with the GPL. At least not if the result is a 'derivative work' of the GPL code. What exactly constitutes a derivative work is something we'll leave to the lawyer-geeks of places like groklaw.net.
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