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?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:50PM
Fuck the lawyers. That seems to be the summary to me. The ONLY lawyers they want discussing the issue, are lawyers who contribute code.* Everyone else can uninvite themselves.
*I wonder how many lawyers actually contribute code to anything? I suppose there may be some, but they are probably as rare as cat-dogs.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:55PM
contribute code
Rule #1 for contributing code: be a SJW.
Violation of Rule #1 will cause your contribution to be ignored with extreme prejudice.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:12PM
I tried writing a piece of legislation once for model parliament,
It is so much like writing code that it is scary.
You need to use precise language to avoid unintended consequences. You often make references to other laws whit would be much like using a software library.
The scary part: the "compiler" is manual for the most part. most the people voting to pass a piece of legislation will not read it. (though my understanding is that a committee may go over it in detail).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:17PM
The big take-away I got from it was that lawyering up makes you look like a bully and an asshole, and will make people less likely to want to do business with you. The hatred of the lawyers in particular was due to the fact that lawyers don't see lawsuits as a personal thing, while everybody else does.
Generally speaking, lawyers are pedantic narcissistic dickheads. The coolest and funniest lawyer I met was the DA at the Hollywood courthouse. I was charged with the heinous crime of drinking beer with a homeless person in public, he told me to admit guilt because the stakes were so low that to fight it would make me look like a wormy asshole, and if I admitted guilt the charges would be dismissed. I admitted guilt, and the Black judge with the thick Jamaican accent dismissed the charges.
The day I was detained for drinking in public at Hollywood a friend I was with was (unlike me) straight-up trashed. He told the driver of the car to pull over immediately because he was going to puke. Since there was no street parking where we were, we pulled into the parking lot of a posh upscale restaurant packed with diners - and when my friend vomited he ran right over to a window and puked his guts out in plain sight of many horrified diners.
Well, shit, it's Hollywood. What do you expect?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday September 04 2016, @06:09PM
Jamaicans can make anything cool :)
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:09PM
The hatred of the lawyers in particular was due to the fact that lawyers don't see lawsuits as a personal thing, while everybody else does.
To them its just money in their pocket, no matter if they win or lose, and no matter what carnage they leave in their wake.
To the people on both sides, those who end up as carnage even if they prevail, there seldom is any "clear win".
Lawyers: The ISIS of the business world.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:21PM
Try this game out: https://lgdb.org/game/chaosesque-anthology [lgdb.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:53PM
The fact is, the people who have created open source and made it a
success have been the developers doing work - and the companies that
we could get involved by showing that we are not all insane crazy
people like the FSF.
Yeah, okay, I guess having principles can make you appear "insane crazy" to people who do not care so much about principles. But to an organization like the FSF that prioritizes ethics, principles, and freedom, it's not crazy at all. I don't support various individual liberties because I think it will boost the economy, for instance. Not everything is about practical gain, unless you're a robot.
I don't think it's right that countless children are forced to use software that does not respect their freedoms in schools, which are supposed to promote education instead of hindering it. I don't think it's right that we're literally surrounded by computers in our every day lives that are black boxes, and yet many of them still contain very sensitive personal information about us and many are used against us.
I don't see what's crazy about talking about ethics and freedom. I applaud the FSF for seeing the big picture, even if they are not necessarily as effective as they could possibly be.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:00PM
Everybody hates the insane crazy people, but everybody loves taking their work and making it their own. Google took Linux and changed the name to Android, to make absolutely sure nobody associates Android with Linux, because Linux has that insane crazy stink. You can trust your Google, they're not the insane crazies at all. Google just monetizes the crazy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:30PM
It is only confusing because you are not distinguishing between the user-land and the kernel.
Common distros are now Android/Linux, SystemD/Linux, GNU/Linux and Busybox/Linux.
All have their strengths and weaknesses.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:04PM
exactly! glad someone else recognized the obvious insidious scam that is going on in schools. Governments using stolen money to buy slaveware to teach your kids to be slaves, all while the parents (who were taught the same) think their poisoned kids are getting the latest tech education b/c they "got charged" for an ipad or a chromebook for little timmy and suzy. At least that's what's going on all over the US, anyways.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:07PM
Governments using stolen money to buy slaveware to teach your kids to be slaves
Dude, you've spent too much time on the Internet. Your brain is fried
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:27PM
Or, alternatively, you spent to much time in school. GP post is pretty insightful, actually.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by rleigh on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:36PM
There's nothing crazy about talking about ethics and freedom.
The point of the article wasn't that this is wrong, but that enforcing your legal rights as a copyright holder via the courts can be strongly counterproductive in the longer term. "Winning" in court is a Pyrrhic victory if it means the loss of your user and developer base as one of the negative effects of litigation. There's clearly a balance between strong licence enforcement and not destroying the viability of your project. And choosing not to pursue legal action might be a better option if possible. Which is not to say that violating the GPL is right, but that the cost of rectifying things legally might be too high. As Linus said (paraphrased), "Leechers are not important". Just as proprietary software companies may choose to ignore low levels of piracy, we may also need to tolerate low levels of licensing noncompliance. Just as deadbeats aren't going to pay for software, they aren't going to care about licensing either.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @01:41PM
A lot of the "deadbeats" seem to be the very same companies that complain about unauthorized copying.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:57PM
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
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.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 04 2016, @05:57PM
If enforcing the terms of the license will cause the destruction of your user and developer base, then perhaps you are using the wrong license. If you wanted a BSD-style "do-whatever-the-heck-you-want-with-it" license, then that's what you should have used in the first place.
I also really have to wonder why suing somebody who was misusing a project would cause a dropoff in your user base. Does anyone have any research for why people stopped using Busybox post-lawsuit?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Sunday September 04 2016, @10:38PM
> Not everything is about practical gain, unless you're a robot
hey!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:21PM
That's what the article says, and I agree. Why are lawsuits so horrible? As the article says, a big issue is collateral damage. A whole bunch of people not directly involved get hurt. For example, at one point in the dispute between RIM (maker of the Blackberry) and a patent troll some years ago, the judge floated the idea of shutting down the Blackberry network which would have screwed a bunch of Blackberry users. They found the good sense not to do that, but the threat was made. Turning the lawyer attack dogs loose is the proverbial sending the bull into the china shop. It's like doing a drive by shooting. The legal eagles have too much power, are too focused on winning the fight at all costs, lose sight of the fact that Solomon never intended to actually cut the baby in half, he was only trying to provoke the real mother into seeing that it is more sensible that her baby live even if another woman gets her baby. Sometimes though, the baby gets chopped up. Some costs are too high. Pyrrhic victory, anyone?
There's also the false choice that was very properly rejected. Fight, or the GPL is meaningless! Sue, or let those cheating scum get away with their theft. They crow that they're crapping on the GPL, and you can't stop them unless you sue. Don't fall for that one. There are other ways to handle the matter. To take publicly licensed code private, they have cut themselves off from the community, and can't get help. It's not even that the community needs to enforce a boycott. It's that the would be cheaters are very likely to run into hard problems that they can't handle themselves, don't have time or resources or possibly talent, and then they're stuck. As long as they're determined to keep their changes private, they can't show their code in order to get help from outsiders. That's powerful incentive for them to eat crow, quietly, and come slinking back to the community.
Wiser courses of action work without resorting to force. The GPL works because it is a wiser path, not because a bunch of enforcement thugs are hovering overhead, ready to beat up anyone who disagrees, whether that be with lawsuits or fists. This urge to use force is a big problem with human nature. So tempting to resort to force, seems so much quicker and more satisfying, punishing the "wrong", serving evildoers their just desserts-- until any of several things occur. Like, there's the embarrassment of feeling all righteous and unleashing your wrath, then learning you made some mistakes yourself. Now what do you do? Some people double down, try to bluster and bully, employ even more force to cover up their mistakes. For example, Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction after all, and, to add to the embarrassment, the West wasn't merely mistaken, they'd hoked up the evidence. Huge, huge damage to Western credibility.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:08PM
If you don't want to fight to enforce the GPL then you should have used the MIT license.
You should talk to a corporate lawyer about the GPL. The GPL works because GPL code scares businesses away because the consequences of using it can be absolutely devastating if your core model is selling your application. The GPL only works if you are selling hardware and/or support but it's impossibly incompatible if you are selling software. The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with software vendors.
Civil lawsuits compared to a military invasion? This is a faulty comparison [logicallyfallacious.com] at best.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:13PM
> The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with software vendors.
No. The business model of selling copies is fundamentally incompatible with the Information Age. The ability to copy belongs to the masses now. Switch to patronage, crowdfunding, ad revenue, endorsements, or some combination of those, and perhaps other business models. Think software vendors can't do that? Look at the Humble Bundle, for just one example.
(Score: 2) by shrewdsheep on Monday September 05 2016, @11:43AM
Wouldn't the Humble Bundle be precisely an example of selling proprietary, non-open source software? It is just auctioned in a particular way. I do not believe that the GPL is fundamentally incompatible with producing proprietary software - you can partition your code to stuff away your important code. However, it certainly makes it more difficult. Many companies go the MIT-way now, e.g. LLVM, Apple and licensing issues are the very reason for Apple's support of LLVM (abandoning gcc).
I do see two big areas where the GPL is big (and should be big). The GNU dream: a fully open source, user-controlled environment. And shrink-wrapped industry solutions (kernel, gcc-toolchain among others) as pointed out above. The support based businesses do exist but there seems to be only space for that many. IMHO the latter model has inherent limitations as as soon as support cost become big enough any customer can roll his own support by hiring own staff. If that does not suit a commercial software company it does look (and should do so) for another license.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 05 2016, @02:27PM
There is a semantics issue, yes. Is Humble Bundle merely passing on the savings achieved with digital distribution, but are still fundamentally selling copies? And what a savings it is from the days of a new release being $60 for a box with a CD/DVD or 3, and sometimes no manual because they want to squeeze the customers for more for that, to $0.25 or thereabouts per game! Or are they actually crowdfunding, sort of a late crowdfunding because the wares are already finished, rather than an early crowdfunding to raise money needed for development?
Consider that one of their selling points is "no DRM". And sometimes, even source code. Not that DRM is effective, but still. And yes, they have collaborated with "DRM done right" Steam, so their claim of no DRM at all is a little gray. Once released, copies of Humble Bundle offerings can be readily available on line, for free, and they look the other way. From a legal standpoint they are selling copies, yes, but de facto, one could argue that what they are really doing is "late crowdfunding".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:01PM
they have cut themselves off from the community, and can't get help
It was BusyBox, what kind of help would they need? They could always log onto Stack Overflow as an individual engineer w/o identifying their product.
If you apply a restrictive license to your product - and the GPL is restrictive - then you have to be prepared to enforce it, or else the license is meaningless. It's like posting a sign "Private parking only" and then not doing anything when random people park their cars there.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:19PM
In essence, it is all that's said.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2016-August/003649.html [linuxfoundation.org]
And it is not newsworthy at all; a common knowledge since GPLv3 at least.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @09:16PM
this is the most relevant comment, he stopped caring about freedoms or openness long time ago. Just look how he let that systemd shit poison the whole linux ecosystem!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @10:46PM
Just look how he let that systemd shit poison the whole linux ecosystem!
Hmm, I must have missed the inclusion of systemd into the Linux kernel, aka the only part of the Linux ecosystem where Linus has control.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:46PM
I think the right way to approach this is, "Play your trump card by holding on to it, but not playing it."
Simply having the GPL trump card gives you leverage, both legally and socially. For example, a large company like Google abides by the GPL (all licenses are distributed with Android, for example), not just for legal reasons, but to maintain a good relationship with the FOSS community.
This is the same way nukes and patents are used now (North Korea and patent trolls need not apply). Companies hold patents not to sue others, but to deter others from suing them. By deter, I don't mean "sue them back" because lawsuits are so damaging. Rather, what happens is "I see you're planning on suing me with that patent you have. See, I also have this patent you are violating. Now, neither of us actually want an expensive lawsuit. How about we give each other licenses for these patents and call it even?"
Diplomacy is great when you have some teeth to back it up, if only so you can negotiate as equals.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday September 05 2016, @07:33AM
I will admit that I have historically approached the issue from the opposite direction, but I found their arguments extremely convincing, and they changed my PoV.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday September 05 2016, @08:45PM
If that's true, then you are advocating to move all FOSS to the public domain?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday September 05 2016, @09:47PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @05:33AM
I'm thinking you're the guy that always loses at cards, and doesn't understand why.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bug1 on Monday September 05 2016, @02:58AM
I was one of the contributors to busybox around that time, i am glad it was and still is being enforced.
Everyone has their biases (me included), but its obvious Linus is putting commercial interests ahead of the interests of users, and its also obvious that its Linus's person opinion and doesnt reflect all Linux contributors. Perhaps he is upset about enforcement because it is something he cant control.
"... we *should* talk about GPL enforcement ... No lawyers present ..."
Linus shows a total lack of respect for Lawyers, its like a bunch a users having a meeting and telling him how to run his project, if you want to achieve a reasonable outcome its best to involve the experts.
Every now and then Linus says something toxic, this is another example, nobody is perfect.
The bottom line is that iIf a license isnt enforced it serves no purpose.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Monday September 05 2016, @02:22PM
Um...I did not know busybox was involved with lawsuits...can someone clarify? So far, the comments nor the articial explains what happened.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @05:54AM
Have to be sued. Listened to the GPL trolls I guess, oh, it's communist, it's unconstitutional, you can't possibly make me comply!
Court saw no issue enforcing it. GPL vindicated.
Corporate shills and anti-GPL trolls went overtime in response. It's so horrible! Companies are afraid to steal our code, lock it up, then sell it back to us as a black box! How horrible.
My take is it was wonderful. It was absolutely wonderful. And if Linus is actually angry that the license which made his career possible was enforced against blatant scofflaws then HE is the one that's crazy. Or worse.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?