[Spooky23]

A few things to consider:

- The government has the power of eminent domain, and the military has a history of "seizing" intellectual property to use for military endeavors.

- The restrictions of the GPL are mostly associated with distribution. As the US Government is a single, sovereign entity, someone with a deep understanding of the law would need to determine whether modifying GPLd source code and putting it on a sovereign-owned drone was "distributing" the code.

[cube13]

Re: Distribution:

There was a satirical post to lwn.net about a month ago that asked whether or not the US Navy would need to pack a CD into missiles that contained GPL software so that the target of the missile would get a copy of the source code when it was "delivered" to them(http://lwn.net/Articles/501536/ ).

[lukev]

Yes. I used to work for the government, and the question came up on several occasions whether it was permissible to download GPL software, make a few tweaks to suit our needs, and then use it only internally without releasing it. I never got a good answer.

[icebraining]

Well, I can tell you it was. The GPL only forces you to distribute the code to whoever got the binaries, and employees don't count. So internal distribution is pretty much "do what you want".