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Linus Speaks His Mind on GPL Enforcement

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-usually-sugarcoated dept.

JaKe writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 04 2016, @05:57PM

    by Thexalon (636) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 04 2016, @05:57PM (#397449)

    "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.

    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.
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