Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM (#397385)

    A lot of the "deadbeats" seem to be the very same companies that complain about unauthorized copying.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:57PM

    by rleigh (4887) on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:57PM (#397435) Homepage

    Absolutely. They could mange to comply but they don't. But the point still stands as to whether legal proceedings are the best solution to that. In some cases they likely are, when they are not meeting their obligations and are refusing to do so. But the cost of doing so may still be detrimental in other ways.

    There are also degrees of noncompliance. Redistributing an unmodified build of busybox but not providing sources is annoying, but not in and of itself that harmful. It's technically wrong but not actually depriving anyone of anything.

    Taking chunks of Linux and wholesale importing it with modifications into a proprietary work is a whole different matter. You should be well within your rights to get the sources for the whole work. Here noncompliance is depriving you of the sources.

    For a lot of cases, such as producing embedded systems with a short lifetime, the companies developers are slapping something together that works and shipping it. They might be used to doing that with proprietary or public domain stuff and think they can get away with it with free software. For many of these cases, the infringement is primarily due to a lack of procedure/process for making a release and ensuring that the licence terms are met. Which isn't hard, but does require that they do the necessary work. It's lazy and irresponsible, but litigation may poison the well for future use of free software by the company. I don't think it's something which should be used except as a last resort. Winning people over inside the company with a carrot is more effective than a stick.

    Lots of organisations get provision of sources wrong, more than anything else. Even open source ones.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:53PM (#397500)

      On the other hand, leaving them alone won't teach them the proper way of doing things with GPL code. This means just because you didn't want to "poison the well" with some small time project that was breaking the rules, they'll continue breaking the rules over and over as time goes on, with larger and larger projects. Eventually you'll have to either tell them to play right (poison the well) or just admit the fact that you've unofficially thrown it into the public domain. And at some point these companies you want to protect for breaking the law will get a new set of balls and take to the courtroom themselves under the assumption that the GPLed code is actually their proprietary code. And then the falling out is 100x worse.

      Far better to make sure they're playing properly from the start. If they don't like having the ability to hide changes to the GPLed code they're using then they should write their own code or use open source code that actually allows them to tell the community doing the bulk of the work for them to piss off.