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Tracking GPL Violators
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, open source developer Harald Welte made headlines when he personally served warning letters to 13 technology companies for alleged GPL violations. Now in a ZDNet interview, Welte explains the challenges behind tracking down these violators and how he persuades them to comply."
It isn't a duplicate in this case. It even references the article that you point out. This provides more information, it isn't the same.
I think you should read the article.
If you can't be bothered here are some relevant points:
What gives you the legal right to pursue the GPL violations? Most of the violations we're seeing are happening in the embedded market. They are running the Linux kernel and I have copyright on parts of the Linux kernel. In the cases that went to court, it was me as an individual copyright holder [against the company in question].
Some people have criticised the GPL for being business-unfriendly, what do you think? I totally disagree.
And, for the BSD fans in this thread:
How do you think the GPL compares with other licenses? It's a philosophical question. The BSD licence allows you to integrate and modify without giving back modifications, while GPL expects you to give back modifications. These are two philosophies of how you develop software. Which you chose depends on the project, for example, if you have a new standard and want it to spread quickly, it's better to use the BSD licence, rather than the GPL.
You sir, seem to be more of a troll than he does (and quite possibly an insensitive clod too)
FFTA:
Q: Why is it important to stop people from violating the GPL?
Welte: You can use all the code out there for free, but if you do modifications you have to give them back to the community -- it's a fairness thing. If we allowed violations to become common, the system would be out of equilibrium. This would result in fewer contributions and it would have a large negative impact on the motivation of developers.
Reflecting this argument back on the file-sharing issue does not work, incidentally. American (Pop) Idol proves, if nothing else, that there are a lot of people willing to do just about anything for a shot to record professionally. Artists make little from their album sales; they make shit-tons from touring. The lion's share of album sales goes to the record company, which then spends it on ads telling you you're depriving the artists when you download music.
The music industry is never going to collapse just because songs are traded online; they'll just turn the screws harder on the artists who get them paid. Disillusioning the small percentage of OSS advocates who actually code by allowing their ideology to be violated is an entirely different story.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Some of the command line tools from MS are based on BSD code. At least the FTP command (maybe others?) has the following string:
Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California
In theory, you are correct. In practice, your point is meaningless. Nobody would pay, because the BSD license already gives everything a commercial developer would want. Nobody pays for what they already have.
Harald Welte mostly operates within german legislation. He even said in the interview, that he goes after resellers rather than the OEMs, because the resellers are within german law.
And in german civil law, the loser pays. Or to be more exact: At the beginning of the process the demands of both parties are put on file (this is the so called Streitwert, the value of the suit), and at the end the resulting awarded damages are compared with the initial demands. The money you have to pay is depending on how much of your own demands got awared to you, and how much you have to pay to the other party. The cost of the suit is determined from the Streitwert (and the cost involves also the payments to the lawyers of both sides), and you pay the cost relatively to your payment to the other side.
This makes it rather risky to pull an SCO in a german court. If any SCO demands 1 billion Euros in a german court, the Streitwert will be at 1 billion Euros. And if SCO in the end gets awarded 10 Mio Euros, SCO would get 1% of the initial demand, so SCO had to pay 99% of the cost of the lawsuit. (In fact it's a little more complicated, this is Germany after all.)
But back to Harald Welte. He doesn't claim financial damage, so the Streitwert is rather low. He normally starts with an injunction requesting the other party to comply to the GPL and release the code in question or to stop infringing on his Urheberrecht (his Author's right to iptables/netfilter code according to the Berne convention), which amounts to stop selling the software or firmware.
A reseller then has to stop selling the product in question, because resellers almost never do have the source code. But they then can either sue the OEM for damages because of lost business or try to get the source code from the OEM and then open it to the public (or at least to the own customers). According to the GPL this heals the infringment. In the end it's the most easy thing for a reseller to press his OEM for the source code than to stop selling a product and even try to get all already sold stock back and destroy it. Only the company Sitecom tried to strike down the Injunction in question and lost in court, which uphelt the injunction. This was a 100% win for Harald, so 100% of the cost of this suit was paid for by Sitecom.