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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 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.