Ranting with no basis

The author of the Inquirer piece has written an extended rant on absolutely no facts. The McAffee annual report contained a small warning to stockholders about a possible liability, the sort of thing that annual reports do all the time (because corporations are big on CYA and hate stockholder lawsuits over undisclosed issues). From that the author claims that this proves that McAffee is infringing in its use of OSS, despite the fact that the author has no direct knowledge of what OSS McAffee is using or how it is using it.

The fact is that nobody knows exactly how a court might resolve questions around some GPL issues, like whether kernel modules are derived work [NOTE - I have no knowledge as to whether McAffee uses such modules, it's just an example or an area where there is a significant range of opinion about exactly what is allowed]. The case law on the GPL is limited and narrow. It's still not clear, for instance, whether courts will read it as a license or as a contract, because there are cases leaning both ways.

And, the idea that McAffee would spend large amounts of money getting into building products for Linux and then feel compelled to push people toward Microsoft is just conspiracy-theory stuff.