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Why the GPL Licensing Cops Are the Good Guys
Reader rtfa-troll writes: "'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched,' says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' The article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody, except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code."
The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.
I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.
Another job well-done, by the alleged editors. That link goes to the second page of a two-page article.
First page.
I think the double standard come from the simple fact that no "serious" GPL advocate has ever tried to sue or extort money from mere users of GPL programs. On the other hand, the "evil" studios or their henchmen (army of lawyer types) appear hellbent on making every freeloading downloader pay. Typical targets of GPL "threats" tend to be companies not individual users.
To expand upon this...
If someone's primary justification for decrying GPL violations is that its wrong to violate copyright, then it would indeed be hypocritical to support piracy of closed-source software. More generally, if the moral argument is that intellectual creation endows people with some intrinsic 'control' or 'ownership' of their creative works, then this moral argument applies equally to open-source and closed-source creations.
However, that is not the only argument in favor of respecting open-source licenses. In fact it may not be the most prevalent. Many people support open-source software because they fundamentally believe in the particular freedoms that are espoused by open-source licenses: that end-users should be unrestricted; that end-users should in fact be empowered to completely control their hardware, which means having the ability to see and edit all source-code; that sharing should be encouraged. Under the moral axioms of 'sharing is good' and/or 'users should be unrestricted' it is not inconsistent to encourage people to respect open-source licenses while simultaneously not respecting restrictive closed-source (or all-rights-reserved) copyrights/EULAs/etc.
My point here is not to promote any particular viewpoint. Rather, I'm responding to OP's assertion that it is hypocritical to support open-source licenses while simultaneously decrying closed-source licenses (or even going to far as to violate them). It may be hypocritical, or it may be consistent. (There's no lack of hypocrisy in this world, Slashdot included.) Many things look hypocritical only because one is making an assumption of the moral precepts that should be followed (normally, one thinks people are hypocritical because their morals are different from your own).
So you need to use software licenses for any FOSS you use that allow you to use their compilers, tools, operating systems and whatever other tools you need in addition to the unique elements you develop on your own to produce a saleable package that customers will be willing to buy, without giving up any right to control copyright of your own work. I think we're all fine with conveying the license to the FOSS software that's included in our packages to the end user without restriction. You want to use the Linux distribution that's included in my package for stuff I didn't envision? Go ahead. I never owned that anyway and I don't care what you do with it as long as you don't drag me into liability issues for your modifications. I just don't want you to copy the elements I made without paying me for each installation.
Fud fud fud!
It's perfectly legal to build proprietary apps on top of Linux, glibc, and other friends. What you have to do is to provide the source to any modifications you make to the FOSS tools or packages, and convey the license to the user.
The elements you made which are not under GPL/similar, you can do whatever you want with them. The author of the GPLed package on the other hand, intended that you give back, as payment for his having built something you can use for free, any modifications you make. Are you saying that I should respect your right to your own license, but you won't respect mine?
Because whoever made the installer did it wrong. When presented with the GPL in an installer, the button should read "Next" or "Continue".
You do not need to accept the GPL just to use GPLed software.