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) 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?