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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: 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!
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