Felipe Contreras wrote at 14:43 (EST) on Tuesday: > Really? So Sony can violate the GPL in some small product, and it > would not affect other product lines, like TVs?
Technically, it *does* impact other products. The question is whether or not Conservancy, as BusyBox's enforcement agent, would *insist* that a company stop distributing *compliant* products when other products are out of compliance. It's true that in very egregious cases, only after years of litigation, Conservancy ended up asking the court for that. However, that's happened twice in the entire 12 year history of GPL enforcement I've done, and I'd already warned the company multiple times we'd need to ask the court for that remedy since they weren't fixing their compliance problems. A company would basically need to willfully ignore contact and discussion with Conservancy for many months before they got in the situation of being sued in the first place. Then, they'd further have to be incredibly non-responsive after the lawsuit was filed to ever have the situation that Tim suggests. And after hundreds of enforcement actions, that situation only ever came close to happening twice, and in fact, in one of those two situations, Conservancy settled the lawsuit before the judge even decided whether to grant the injunction. > You must not know how a big company works. It's not a matter of > resources; it's a matter of control and organization. The bigger a > company is, the more difficult it is to have tight control over all > areas. I do know somewhat how big companies work: they spend resources on things that matter to them, and ignore things that don't. In my experience, GPL enforcement is the only way to get GPL compliance to matter to them. Otherwise, many companies merely ignore the GPL. (Others, I should note, like Red Hat, HP, Google, etc. do a good job without any enforcement actions against them, because they have decided it's the right thing to do and just comply.) -- Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
