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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-usually-sugarcoated dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:42PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:42PM (#397359) Journal

    Did you RTFA?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM (#397386) Journal
    I don't know about the initial poster, but I did RTFA. It sounds like the Linux project has leverage and Greg KH has a fair bit of soft power at his disposal. Namely, if someone insists on a closed, license-violating implementation, they still have to play ball, if they want to get things like support for their modules or drivers, reduced long term legal liability, a potential hit to their reputation, free coding for relevant issues, etc. Greg KH apparently has also been successful at getting internal developers to support GPL compliance.

    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

      by RamiK (1813) on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:13PM (#397452)

      observer bias. The vast majority of the violators and potential violators migrated to Android & Windows years ago.

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      compiling...
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Monday September 05 2016, @02:47AM

      by stormwyrm (717) on Monday September 05 2016, @02:47AM (#397635) Journal

      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:

      ...A quiet initial contact is usually sufficient to resolve the problem. Parties thought they were complying with GPL, and are pleased to follow advice on the correction of an error. Sometimes, however, we believe that confidence-building measures will be required, because the scale of the violation or its persistence in time makes mere voluntary compliance insufficient. In such situations we work with organizations to establish GPL-compliance programs within their enterprises, led by senior managers who report to us, and directly to their enterprises' managing boards, regularly. In particularly complex cases, we have sometimes insisted upon measures that would make subsequent judicial enforcement simple and rapid in the event of future violation.

      In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.

      In the early years of the free software movement, this was probably the only strategy available. Expensive and burdensome litigation might have destroyed the FSF, or at least prevented it from doing what we knew was necessary to make the free software movement the permanent force in reshaping the software industry that it has now become. Over time, however, we persisted in our approach to license enforcement not because we had to, but because it worked. An entire industry grew up around free software, all of whose participants understood the overwhelming importance of the GPL—no one wanted to be seen as the villain who stole free software, and no one wanted to be the customer, business partner, or even employee of such a bad actor. Faced with a choice between compliance without publicity or a campaign of bad publicity and a litigation battle they could not win, violators chose not to play it the hard way.

      --
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    • (Score: 1) by bug1 on Monday September 05 2016, @04:13AM

      by bug1 (5243) on Monday September 05 2016, @04:13AM (#397665)

      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

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 05 2016, @02:46PM (#397801) Journal

        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

          by bug1 (5243) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @12:23AM (#397929)

          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

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:09AM (#397936) Journal
            I'm not hearing much of a criticism. There could be a lot of potential GPL violations which doesn't mean that there are, or that these violations have to be dealt with via a lawsuit. And in the BusyBox case, there's a remarkable lack of support for the SFC's actions from the developers to the point that various developers have proposed (or more accurately restarted) a replacement project [lwn.net] for BusyBox under a more lenient license.

            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

              by bug1 (5243) on Thursday September 08 2016, @12:17PM (#399125)

              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

      by Arik (4543) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:02AM (#397990) Journal
      It's quite effective as long as there is a credible threat of legal action behind it. The threat doesn't need to be explicit. The busybox suit he's crying about made that MUCH easier going forward.

      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.
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