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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 Arik on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:02AM

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @06:02AM (#397990) Journal
    It's quite effective as long as there is a credible threat of legal action behind it. The threat doesn't need to be explicit. The busybox suit he's crying about made that MUCH easier going forward.

    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.
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