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Friendlier GPL-Enforcement Permission Proposed By Linux Kernel Developers (kroah.com)
The former Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation -- and Slashdot user #41121 -- contacted Slashdot with this announcement. bkuhn -- now president of the Software Freedom Conservancy --
writes: Software Freedom Conservancy, home of the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, publicly applauded today the proposal of the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement, which adds a per-copyright-holder-opt-in additional permission to the termination provisions of Linux's GPLv2-only license.
It apparently addresses a developer who "made claims based on ambiguities in the GPL-2.0 that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance," according to a statement from some of the kernel developers who drafted the statement. While the kernel community has always supported enforcement efforts to bring companies into compliance, we have never even considered enforcement for the purpose of extracting monetary gain... [W]e are aware of activity that has resulted in payments of at least a few million Euros. We are also aware that these actions, which have continued for at least four years, have threatened the confidence in our ecosystem. Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again. It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified.
It apparently addresses a developer who "made claims based on ambiguities in the GPL-2.0 that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance," according to a statement from some of the kernel developers who drafted the statement. While the kernel community has always supported enforcement efforts to bring companies into compliance, we have never even considered enforcement for the purpose of extracting monetary gain... [W]e are aware of activity that has resulted in payments of at least a few million Euros. We are also aware that these actions, which have continued for at least four years, have threatened the confidence in our ecosystem. Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again. It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified.
but switched over to be more in favour of the BSD/ISC/MIT licences because they are maximally free. The GPL is largely unfriendly to corporate and academic interests. Some code needs to be proprietary--life is about pragmatism sometimes, not always about ideology. More and more, academics are releasing their code under the BSD/ISC licences because they realise that because they are receiving public money to fund their code and research, by dint of this, they must release the results of that money to the public in a maximally free way, even if some would take the results and monetise it. There is nothing wrong with proprietary code, guys. Not everything needs to be open source. It's preferabe, yes, but not always possible.
If you kill and eat animals, you should kill and eat people also. Issues should resolve to black and white only, no shades of grey.
Apparently, a few years ago, some Linux developer named McHardy started enforcing the GPL in Germany on his own. See e.g. the background article at https://sfconservancy.org/blog...
It looks like he tends to sue GPL-violators for about 2000€ + his costs (attorny fees for trying to settle out of court, costs for reverse engineering):
Example where he successfully sued the Germany subsidy of a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer for a total of about 2900€: LG Frankfurt, 2-6 O 224/06 http://www.jbb.de/fileadmin/do...
However, there was also a case where he demanded and got more: A GPL-violator that he had contacted in 2010, and got to comply with the GPL out of court back then became a repeat offender in 2012. He sued them for for 5000€ + attorny fees of 2000€: LG Hamburg, 308 O 10/13 http://www.damm-it-recht.de/lg...
On the other hand, most Linux developers apparently think that free software developers and organizations tasked with GPL enforcement should not profit from suing GPL violators. The Software Freedom Conservancy is losing money from enforcing the GPL, and asks for donations to be able to continue their work.
Philipp