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In the time leading up to the next Kernel Summit topics are presented and discussed beforehand on the Ksummit-discuss mailing list. There [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues was introduced. Even though Linus is not subscribed to this list he speaks his mind, bluntly. A good read.
I'm not aware of anybody but the lawyers and crazy people that were happy about how the BusyBox situation ended up. Please pipe up if you actually know differently. All it resulted in was a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Botht he original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.
So I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working title.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:27PM
Most people agree that war is bad, but sometimes it's necessary.
I don't understand what Torvalds' point is. Both sides lost when the GPL was enforced for BusyBox, so that means that the copyright shouldn't have been enforced? What would he do differently next time an infringement occurred and the violators refused to rectify the situation.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:42PM
Did you RTFA?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM
I never thought about that sort of approach and merely assumed that fairly hardcore legal measures were required for the recalcitrant GPL abusers. But this approach sounds like it is surprisingly effective.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:13PM
observer bias. The vast majority of the violators and potential violators migrated to Android & Windows years ago.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Monday September 05 2016, @02:47AM
That is pretty much the way the Free Software Foundation itself has historically dealt with GPL violations [gnu.org]. As Prof. Eben Moglen, who was, up until 2006, general counsel for the FSF, puts it:
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by bug1 on Monday September 05 2016, @04:13AM
Would this type of soft enforcement work if there was no serious threat of actually being taken to court ?
Expecting the license (and the movement) to survive off the goodwill of corporations is very naive.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 05 2016, @02:46PM
Would this type of soft enforcement work if there was no serious threat of actually being taken to court ?
The claim is "Yes" and I'd say the lack of large scale violations of the GPL indicates something is going right.
(Score: 1) by bug1 on Tuesday September 06 2016, @12:23AM
I'd say the lack of large scale violations of the GPL indicates something is going right
By what information do you make this claim ?
You should know there about a billion android devices, and only a very small percentage DONT have proprietary drivers, thats a lot of potential GPL violations.
You should know that of the few of people in the world doing enforcement, none need to actually go out and look for violators, most try and limit what work they take on.
You should know that a standard open source strategy used by corporations is to share nothing until they are threatened.
And it takes SFC about 6 years to resolve a case, they are a non-profit, Linus should be ashamed of himself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:09AM
As the ex-maintainer of busybox who STARTED those lawsuits in the first place and now HUGELY REGRETS ever having done so, I think I'm entitled to stop the lawsuits in whatever way I see fit.
They never resulted ina single line of code added to the busybox repository. They HAVE resulted in more than one company exiting Linux development entirely and switching to non-Linux operating systems for their embedded products, and they're a big part of the reason behind Android's "No GPL in userspace" policy. (Which is Google, not Sony.)
Toybox is my project. I've been doing it since 2006 because I believe I can write a better project than busybox from an engineering perspective. I mothballed it because BusyBox had a 10 year headstart so I didn't think it mattered how much BETTER it was, nobody would use it. Tim pointed out I was wrong about that, I _agreed_ with him once I thought about it, so I've started it up again.
(Score: 1) by bug1 on Thursday September 08 2016, @12:17PM
There was enforcement work being done for busybox before that, and even before SFC existed.
There is one developer who is unhappy with SFC, and he is unhappy with FSF and pretty much anything related to it.
People see what they want to see.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:02AM
The problem is, if you rule out legal action ahead of time, that threat is no longer there, and the 'less aggressive' approach will no longer work either. You can't throw that bathwater out without the baby going too. Yet that's exactly what Linus seems to think should be done. Crazy? Man should look in the mirror after posting that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:55PM
i think him and greg noah hartman(sp?) basically said that they would keep working with the degenerate scum until they convinced them over time that it was in their best interests overall to comply with the gpl. I can understand their point of view, as i'm not litigious either but if you're going to have a copyleft you have to enforce it in that system. I think it's a little insensitive of linus in regards to the FSC who are probably licking their wounds right now, even if they are lawyers they are gpl loving lawyers for the love of god.
Otherwise, we should just put a warning on the code that says if someone doesn't follow our license we'll send a team of highly religious assassins to their house to send a message to other scum like vmware. I have no sympathy for these dumb !@%#$ and would support such methods.. I guess they're feeling pretty smart right now, though. They're on the list with POS like stephen elop and his sponsoring company at the time.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:41PM
Why did that quote from Linus end one sentence too soon?
So I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something
that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working
title:
"Lawyers: poisonous to openness, poisonous to community, poisonous to
projects".
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday September 05 2016, @01:16AM
That's his point, it is not necessary. Linux, and projects like it, is about community and good will. Lawsuits divides community even if you win. Some folks just don't see that. Some folks are so entrenched in the binary view of the world: winning or losing, ownership or non-ownership, rights or non-rights, that they lose sign of all the benefits you get operating in the middle.
Lawyers can't seem to grasp this. Evangelists/Protectionists can't seem to grasp this. Organizations (driven by either of the first 2) can't seem to grasp this.
I'm not Greg or Linux so I can't really testify, but they're saying they have encountered situations similar to BusyBox, where folks violate/infringe right in their face but they did not go down the path of legal enforcement as whatever the outcome, it will not be good for the software/project even if you "win".
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @05:41AM
1. Corporations are not people, and they are not part of the community. No matter how much they pay Linus.
2. The binary oppositional view of the world is indeed a more limited and weaker one than a broader more coöperative way, and the latter is better, on that much we agree. But you miss the practical facts, that our legal system in particular is built on that first view and it is forcibly applied to us whether we wish it to be or not. The GPL is and has always been a 'legal hack' that uses the rules of the old world to carve out a space for the new one to operate. When you compromise that hack in the name of coöperation, what you actually do is weaken that shell of law that's been carved out to permit coöperation. This is, assuming it's not simply a clever attack against the community, self-defeating effort at best.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:35AM
There are a couple of relevant points that seem to elude your grasp as well.
No they don't, but if you feel your life is a lot better making those claims about me, feel free. I'm glad I can make the world a better place for you.
1. Corporations are not people, and they are not part of the community. No matter how much they pay Linus.
Yes captain obvious. Again, some folks tend to take a binary view on this, but corporations do not all interface in the same manner. The big ones are quite notorious and may be quite indifferent and almost dispassionately inhuman in its machinations to deal with for sure. But there are small to mid size corporations as well and some of these do have a more humanistic side when dealing with them. What Greg is saying though is one thing is for sure, the moment you pull in lawyers, they _all_ retreat back into that walled garden.
2. The binary oppositional view of the world is indeed a more limited and weaker one than a broader more coöperative way, and the latter is better, on that much we agree. But you miss the practical facts, that our legal system in particular is built on that first view and it is forcibly applied to us whether we wish it to be or not. The GPL is and has always been a 'legal hack' that uses the rules of the old world to carve out a space for the new one to operate. When you compromise that hack in the name of coöperation, what you actually do is weaken that shell of law that's been carved out to permit coöperation. This is, assuming it's not simply a clever attack against the community, self-defeating effort at best.
Yes, the law is binary. Yes, it is forcibly applied to us whether we wish it or not. However, it has to be initiated by someone making a decision at some point. That is not binary. At least it doesn't have to be is what Greg was suggesting. It seems to what the other guy was suggesting, i.e. the moment there is a someone violating lets go legal on them. The fact that the law is binary is why you want to avoid it. You can win but you lose a lot of goodwill from folks caught in the crossfire and definitely from the losers, so you lose one of the key ingredients behind the spirit of GPL that is the community. Or you can lose.. and well lose everything.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:56AM
It's obvious to me but just reading the link in the OP it's plain that this is something both Torvalds and GKH have trouble keeping clear in their own minds.
"Again, some folks tend to take a binary view on this, but corporations do not all interface in the same manner. The big ones are quite notorious and may be quite indifferent and almost dispassionately inhuman in its machinations to deal with for sure. But there are small to mid size corporations as well and some of these do have a more humanistic side when dealing with them. What Greg is saying though is one thing is for sure, the moment you pull in lawyers, they _all_ retreat back into that walled garden."
Not quite accurate or at all relevant. You're missing the point. The interactions are always between individuals. The corporation is a floating abstraction, a legal fiction, a 'ghost in the machine.' You cannot directly interact with a corporation, only with human beings who are temporarily empowered to act on its behalf. Those human beings may of course be members of the community, but the corporation itself, the fiction that they temporarily serve, is an entity of a different order entirely. Dealing with intelligent, productive, contributing human beings who are agents of a corporation has a natural tendency to create an emotional bond that is felt to be with the corporation, but unlike emotional bonds with people, an emotional bond with a corporation is always completely and absolutely one-way. It's a delusion, one might even say a mental illness, though it's quite common today.
GKH has done some great work, and I can see in part he went off because he felt slighted by a comment that probably wasn't aimed at him but failed to take him into account. Linus piled on without any such obvious rationale. But both of them are acting like their ability to jet around the world and meet important people face to face and work things out diplomatically over periods of years while making big $$$ is entirely the result of their own work and virtue and has absolutely nothing to do with the FSF which spent years creating the space where what they do is possible, and defending that space. Linus is really deeply, deliberately insulting to people that he should be grateful to, and it's disgusting.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:52AM
That's nothing new. Linus has been like that for years. When he opens his mouth about technical issues he's usually right, but when he talks about legal and tactical issues or anything having to do with the community his wisdom is notable for non-existence. He often abuses the people that made his work possible, in the crudest of terms, and quite often acts like a spoiled child, as you can see in this case.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?