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."

Comments

Here are your options

[Mancat]

1. License software under GPL. Worry about who is using it illegally, devote efforts to tracking down violators and prosecuting them. 2. License software under BSDL. Sit back and relax with a beer.

I really, really hope

[pair-a-noyd]

that they had the sense to serve on SCO..

Please tell me they did..

It is legal to use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Using and modifying GPL code is absolutely legal. What is illegal is distributing it only in binary form, and not allowing access to the modifications. This difference isn't very well stated in the article (yes, I read the article, and anyone who doesn't read past the first page won't see it on the second page), it simply says it is illegal to use the code.

GPL violation trolls

[ites]

There are some voices on Slashdot that claim that GPL violators are just like file sharers. (And that to treat them differently is hypocritical.)

Indeed, both discussions are about copyright. But they are also more fundamentally about fair use.

The GPL is based on the author's copyright and a very generous fair use license that promotes shared investment in the work. When a company takes GPL'd work and resells derived works without respecting the author's copyright, they are taking someone's work and reselling it without respecting the original author's rights.

Now to file sharing. Yes, this is also about copyright and fair use. However, it is rarely about restricting access to a work, it is about broadening that access.

The moral debate is simple: all technology, all creative work, all artistic creation and invention is the result of a continuous cultural stream that stretches back to the origins of our species. Every single creative act is a pebble placed on a mountain built by our ancestors.

Slashdotters tend to understand this intuitively. We don't like patents because they claim ownership of something we know to belong to us all. We don't like GPL violators because they take common property and resell it under false pretenses. We don't like DRM because it takes common property and fences it off. We tolerate file sharing and defend those who do it because we know that the alternative is cultural sterility, decay, and evetually extinction.

There is no contradiction here. Anyone who takes sacks of pebbles from the mountain and says "these are now mine" is a simple rogue, legalised or not, and we all know it.

Re:GPL violation trolls

[mqx]

Now we can all sleep with a conscience, knowing that we've reasoned ourselves around how theft of music/software copyright is "okay" because it "broadens its access", but theft of GPL works is not okay because it "restricts its access".

Superficially, that looks like a great argument. However, you forgot something important: fundamental rights of freedom and choice, because in both cases, the theft is ignoring the original choice and intentions of the copyright holder. You simply optioned for some so called "public good" at the expense of the creative individual, but really, your "public good" is just your own justification to suggest that music/software theft is acceptable.

Really: if you don't like copyright restrictions on works, choose alternatives, don't steal and then try to use a "robin hood" style argument to justify "public good". If you were stealing essential foodstuffs from wealthy to feed the poor, I could understand. However, music/software are not essential foodstuffs, and even if they were, there are plenty of free/share versions you can use without resorting to theft.

Bluntly: you don't need to steal music/software any more: there are a lot of free/share alternatives, and, the more you use those alternatives, the greater the critical mass, and the more they will grow and expand.

Re:GPL violation trolls

[ScentCone]

Anyone who takes sacks of pebbles from the mountain and says "these are now mine" is a simple rogue, legalised or not, and we all know it.

There are some "pebbles" that simply would not be added to your metaphorical mountain if their creators/innovators didn't have some expectation of being able to earn a living while producing them. Most creative types don't say to themselves, "I'm about to invest a couple-plus years of my life writing Cryptonomicon... but I'd better keep sucking up to my boss at the IHOP because my cultural history tells me I shouldn't expect a paycheck from book royalties, ever."

There is a contradiction in your message. People create under a legal framework upon which they base their expectations of interaction with other people. If they want to GPL their work, great. That defines a certain expected course of events and options. If they want to limit the distribution of their years of work to those people that are willing pay for entertainment, and thus stop waiting tables at IHOP (I know, Neal did not wait tables at IHOP), then that choice is also well supported under law. The problem we have is that people confuse the technical ability to avoid paying for someone's labor of years with the right to do so. Those authors/artists/developers that do indeed want a broader audience for their work do not necessarily mean that they want that to happen without expecting that audience to realize that the work has value, and to pay for it.

Your cultural stack of pebbles wouldn't exist without the daily work of creative people who continually add to it and also need to pay the rent. Culture is not some fixed pie to be divided up for free. It's the result of people's daily work, creativity, and commerce, and it thrives best when the most creative people available know that they can make a living doing what they do best. We all benefit, and paying an artist a few cents for their song is just fine. If you don't like that approach, then that means you don't like the artist for having made the choice to profit from their labors. And if you have any intellectual honesty, you'll decide you don't want to hear that artist's music anyway (since you can't stand the idea of them having decided to earn a living by selling, rather than giving away, their life's work).

Re:GPL violation trolls

[mqx]

You (and the couple of others that responded to me) are not listening either.

You moved onto the philosophical debate about "property" and "ownership" and whether intellectual property and music/software does have these properties. This is a good debate to have.

However, if you pay attention: we are in a free society where not everyone agrees to your view about property. The IP system, and copyright, allows individuals to make the choice either way. It's obvious that some other people have chosen to protect their property, and some have given it away (GPL). The most important thing for you is to respect their choice, not trample all over their choice and their rights to satisfy your own view of how things should work.

Back to the OP: social arguments about whether something should be free or not are good arguments: but they come before the point at which someone decides to apply GPL or other rights restrictions. Once they do decide to apply their choice of licensing, you should, as a mature and civil person, accept their choice. Otherwise, quite simply, you (or a large enterprise) are trampling over those rights for your (or the enterprise) benefit, against the wishes of the licensor.

Good reasons for chosing GPL over BSD

[ites]

I've written many free software tools over the years. I've licensed these using the GPL, BSD licenses, and finally switched a couple of years ago to GPL for everything.

Why? There are several reasons:

1. I relicense the same source code commercially. This means companies pay for commercial licenses which do not have any GPL-like requirements. This is of course my right since I'm the author. It provides some nice income. Not possible with BSD licenses.

2. Other free software developers are given a competitive advantage when they use my GPL'd code. Commercial developers can choose to pay if they want to escape the GPL license. When I used BSD licenses, I was actually giving a competitive advantage to those who reused my source code in commercial products.

The GPL is a weapon, of course, and no-one likes being at the receiving end. But for any developer who has spent years (decades, even) writing open source, it's an excellent and far-sighted choice.

In other words...

[Shivetya]

If you make something and don't share it your in the wrong? Sorry but that doesn't work.

The whole twisted idea of trying to disassociate ownership from original works is a very selfish position.

Those pebbles that came off the mountain only did so because someone put the effort into doing so. If you want their pebbles you can meet their requirements or go get your own. You however do not have a right to take their pebbles just because you might have/could have/would have done it. Anyone who wants to take the effort/work of others without compensation is just a selfish bastard.

GNU GPL for documentation

[xiando]

I used to publish documents under teh GNU GDL, the GPL for text http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto.html - but after actually reading it I found it had some very strange points that kind of limits "fair use" (freedom) as I instended. Now I use Creative Commons 2.0, a license I find more suited for the modern Internet.

From the ZDNet article...

[zotz]

"If companies are only using GPL-licensed software internally, they only need to distribute the source code to their employees."

Is he sure about that? First time I have heard this as a requirement.

all the best,

drew

http://zbcw.sourceforge.net/

Re:Avoidance and respect as alternatives to coerci

[swillden]

The best response is: "No, we don't. We use the public domain. So there."

No, a much better response is: "Reasonable copyright laws, with durations and scope that actually maximize the public good, serve our purposes as copyright owners just as well as laws that are insanely restrictive and have uselessly long terms. GPL software authors would be perfectly happy with copyrights that lasted 28 years, or even less."

As for the argument that we should simply allow everyone to choose whether or not they want to share their changes to their code, rather than "enforcing" it through the GPL... either you're naive or a Microsoft et al shill.

There's nothing morally wrong, or inferior, about using the GPL, any more than there's something wrong with wanting to be paid for your work. Following your line of thought, you should also donate your physical labor to the public good as well, right? And, more specifically, donate your labor to your employer and then argue that you've donated it to the public good.

Developers use the GPL because they hope to get paid for their work. Not paid in currency, typically, and the payment isn't guaranteed by any means, but they do want to be paid by receiving improvements to their own work. The logic is: "I want to write X because I need X, but I don't have the time or resources to create it all by myself. Perhaps if I write half of it, producing something useful but not really complete, and publish the code under the GPL, others will contibute their time to help me complete it. And perhaps they'll even help me make a better X than I would have even if I had time."

Of course, you can do the same thing with public domain code, but if you use the public domain you run a much greater risk of not seeing any of the improvements.

The notion that you can successfully shame people into sharing is simply naive. In particular, it doesn't work well if the non-sharer has a large advertising budget and you do not.