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Understanding the New Red Hat-IBM-Google-Facebook GPL Enforcement Announcement (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. Bruce Perens writes: Red Hat, IBM, Google, and Facebook announced that they would give infringers of their GPL software up to a 30-day hold-off period during which an accused infringer could cure a GPL violation after one was brought to their attention by the copyright holder, and a 60 day "statute of limitations" on an already-cured infringement when the copyright holder has never notified the infringer of the violation. In both cases, there would be no penalty: no damages, no fees, probably no lawsuit; for the infringer who promptly cures their infringement.
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
From the article:
Q: Is it true that the principles the four companies announced today are taken from the GPL 3 license, but they are applying them to GPL 2?
A: Yes. If your software is under GPL 3, the same waiting periods that the four companies have promised are required. Thus, it is ironic that when originally presented with the opportunity to apply the GPL 3 to Linux, Linus Torvalds and the Kernel team were quite hostile about it, while the kernel team’s recent announcement attributes the principles they have adopted to the text in GPL 3. Perhaps they’ve learned something since those hostile moments.
As far as I can tell so far (not having read the actual cases) it's McHardy's legal right. However, the Kernel Team is bothered that it might turn users away from Linux and don't condone his asking people for money. Nor do any community norms I've seen in 20 years approve of his behavior.
Bruce Perens.
Copyright is not the only possible legal regime. It's just the one we have now. A legal structure supporting openness could exist side-by-side with proprietary copyright.
Bruce Perens.
"....This is disappointing when copyleft should really be at war with ...."
The thing about going to war is that you have to win. If you lose you typically lose in catastrophic, irreversible, grossly injurious ways at best and fatally at worst. If you achieve stalemate you may be so impoverished that you dare not assert your rights in future, and may
find yourself a much more visible and softer target for other adversaries. You have to win, and win unambiguously even if not in every detail. Cheerleading for war from a position of financial inferiority, legal ambiguity and lack of adequate precedent, is beyond brave and well into the realm of foolishness or even suicidal tendency.
The corporate world is playing hard ball, and the open source world wants to string daisy chains.
Community can be great but isn't enough to make sure our code is used the way we want. Making a choice about what license we are going to use isn't the end of our copyright decision-making. If we want our licenses to be effective, we need to plan for enforcement, for inheritance, and for who will "own" the copyright in our code even if we want our code to be free.
Real lawyers write in C++
Most libertarians still believe they have a right to keep uninvited guests out of their living room. I think the same applies to GPL software. The developers made the rules for their party. If you don't want to play by their rules, you do still have no limit on your freedom: you are entirely free to write your own software and set your own rules for it.
Bruce Perens.
Without copyright there is no such thing as the GPL. There is no such thing as copyleft,
Without copyright, there would be no need for copyleft. Somewhat counterintuitively, it's GPL (v2) rather than BSD/MIT that emulates a world without copyright better: we'd have decompilers.
Decompiling is merely an optimization problem: make a front-end that takes x86/etc code (these already exist), output C/etc code, optimizing for human readability; you lose comments and (without debug info) function and variable names. The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet is that cases when using source recovered this way are so niche it's not worth the effort.
For pretty much any interesting program, people would clean up and comment such source, thus there'd be no commercial benefit for keeping the code closed. And, releasing real source means you get better outside contributions, thus cooperating with your users is a win. Ie, we'd have an all-GPL world.
I specified GPLv2, as there exist a way around decompilers: DRM. Of course, doing so on a general-purpose CPU would be mere pointless obfuscation (just run the thing in an emulator and dump memory when decrypted), thus such evil CPU would need to include sealed DRM chips. But, the corp would still have to give the user both the lock and the key: decapping is not that simple, but it can be done, immediately breaking all DRMed code runnable by the chip that got decapped. DRM is physically impossible, it serves merely as a stumbling block. At this point, it'd be so niche that no company would really bother, turning the tables to what we have now with decompilers.
We'd end with a prisoner dilemma world where everyone cooperates, instead of current population of defectors.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If your goal is having as many users as possible, you don't set out to use the GPL. Inherent in that choice you are rejecting some users in favor of gaining a better bargain for everyone else. The Kernel Team still has trouble dealing with this.
Bruce Perens.
No. Last I heard (and many people are not aware of this) the VMWare case was under appeal in Germany. Meaning that VMWare could still lose. However, VMWare has been given cure periods far in excess of the ones mentioned here.
Bruce Perens.
The prisoner's dilemma doesn't result in everyone cooperating. If it did, then it wouldn't be a dilemma.
If the reward for defecting is small enough, and the population punishes defectors enough, it's a smart play to cooperate. If the payoffs are (5,0), (3,3), (0,5), (1,1), you can get 5 once then nothing but 1s for the rest of your life -- while everyone else keeps getting 3s. On the other hand, if you're in a population of defectors, cooperation is suicidal. Note that in a world of cooperation, the average person fares drastically better.
But alas, we live in a world where defectors buy themselves draconian copyright laws, and attempt to make cooperation illegal (like FCC rules or Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
In case you didn't realize, the original article is the last link. Or you can just look at it here.
Bruce Perens.
Please tell me why I should be unable to defend myself in my own home.
And don't tell me "call the police". Not a single crime I've been a victim of that I reported had been acted upon, even though in two of three times catching the perpetrator would be trivial (unprovoked battery: the bum kept sitting there, cell phone robbery: robbers did not turn the phone off). That's why I don't even bother to report crimes anymore. On the other hand, try to cross the street at a crosswalk with a broken (always red) light...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
They may or may not have been worse than Hitler, but Hitler is not worse than Hitler.
To be less flippant:
Of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Muhammad it seems that Hitler is the only one who sought to murder millions of people as a matter of policy, on principle as it were. The others murdered millions of people, evidently many more millions in the cases of Stalin and Mao, incidentally. The moral import of this escapes me. To be in fear is to be in fear. To be murdered is to be murdered. The scale of the crimes defies my ability to assess or differentiate.
The problem is that in many jurisdictions non-enforcement of copyright violations makes the license unenforceable. I'm not sure what the statutes of limitations are here (and I also think they are very flexible), but I would say much of the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel code could probably be considered "public domain" in many areas by now.
If there is a "community agreement" not to sue infringers of the GPL licence in connection with the kernel, then I'd say that is evidence that the license is void and any compliance is simply goodwill.
You can't "demand" money for people that are in compliance with the license, you can if they are infringing. I know various vendors that are non-compliant and neither the FSF nor anyone in the community wants to "do" anything about it even though they severely limit the freedom of the product. I have a set of devices on my bench that are simply useless because the Linux kernel modifications on it sits behind an NDA and the vendor nor the producer wants to comply with the license.
That issue has turned me off Linux as a platform recently as it's just another closed source system in many cases, so I might as well use an existing proprietary system that 'just works'.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The point of Open Source isn't really to have source code. That source is a means to an end, but not the end itself. The end goal is to have software that end users can modify to suit their purposes. And even further, the ability to legally share those modifications with other end users.
It is difficult to share modifications with binary patch schemes, and it is difficult to write those modifications. And I say this as a someone who spend a lot of time on 8-bit computers in the 80's where we did this sort of thing.
I wish decompilers were better. I've used them before, and HexRays is the best I've used but it's still sub-optimal. This is partly because the act of compiling discards much of the annotation that we enjoy in source code. You can find many obfuscators for your source code that basically discard annotation and mutate the structure of your code to make it difficult for a human being to comprehend. Distributing obfuscated source code is not really any better than distributing binaries, and is not at all in the spirit of the GPL.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Creating a Laches (which is what you are talking about) isn't really the same as placing something in the public domain. Laches means you waited for economic demand for the infringing product to develop before you brought the lawsuit, presumably to enrich your income. It doesn't apply to the next new infringer to come along.
Also, be careful not to confuse it with trademarks going into the public domain.
Bruce Perens.