The following is being added to Tony Healey's Progress Snapshot GPLv3 and Web Businesses.

CLARIFICATION (Feb. 28, 2006): We were asked why a web services company (an ASP) would be required to disclose source code for technology it created itself. Here is Tony Healy's answer:

The disclosure requirement in GPLv3 would apply to web companies because many of them have taken advantage of having Linux source code to partially integrate their systems into the operating system, for performance and convenience reasons. Therefore their systems, or parts of them, are defined as enhancements of the Linux source code.

This is particularly the case with Google, which utilises the performance benefits of reaching into the operating system to speed up searching. An example of this work is described in a 2003 paper by Ghemawat, Gobioff and Leung describing the development of a scalable, fault tolerant distributed file system called the Google File System.* They corrected esoteric protocol mismatches that caused quiet failures, and contention between file and network locks that caused timeouts even under light load.

* Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, The Google File System, 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Lake George, NY, October, 2003.

(Corrected 02/28/06, 06:15 p.m.)