On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:45 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: > Felipe Contreras wrote at 11:31 (EDT) on Monday: >> if you are a big company an a unit used my code by mistake I'm not >> going to sue you and screw the rest of your units. > > I don't think anyone, including those of us in the BusyBox community who > enforce the GPL, want to "screw" companies or any of their units! No > company who makes good efforts to fix compliance problems has ever been > sued by any BusyBox copyright holder. Do you know of a specific case > where that's not true?
So if part of the company makes good efforts, and another part of the company does not, the company as a whole wouldn't be sued? I think it would. >> No, I'm explaining why the Linux kernel developers don't want that. I >> do hope the Busybox developers see the light as well, but I'm not >> holding my breath. > > BusyBox and Linux developers are now working together on GPL > enforcement, coordinated via Conservancy, as I mentioned in this email > that I sent on 29 May 2012, which was posted as follow-up to this thread: > http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2012-May/077908.html *Some* Linux developers. Probably the copyrights owned by these don't even amount to 1% of the Linux code. > Clearly, some Linux copyright holders and some BusyBox copyright holders > are in agreement to work on compliance together in the same way. > > Indeed, Conservancy as a whole and I personally listened carefully to > the feedback from this thread and other places that had a discussion > about this. I heard the message that the community wanted to see a > broad coalition of copyright holders of different projects who all agree > on enforcement strategy. Denys even personally asked me to make sure > that Conservancy's compliance efforts were as inclusive as possible. > And, that's what we now have. I hope this means the proxy strategy doesn't get used: if a company violated the busybox GPL, that doesn't mean it cannot ship products with other GPL projects (e.g. Linux). >> If you have a bad unit that screwed up, and this affects the products >> of good units; that's not good. > > Even after all this time since this discussion started, no one has shown > one example where this outcome *actually* occurred. This was a > speculation of what a copyright holder *could* ask for under copyright > law in the USA if infringement occurs. Lawyers don't care about things actually occurring, but what could potentially happen. And potentially if say one unit of Sony is negligent and has a GPL violation shipping busybox, Conservancy could ask for an injunction to stop all products shipping GPL code, including products from another unit who did it's job properly. Simply having this threat would make lawyers worry, and recommend busybox not to be used. If Conservancy explicitly states that only projects that want GPL enforcement will be targeted, and not use the proxy method to target *all* GPL code, then perhaps in practice people won't have problems using busybox. But I haven't seen any public statement of this sort, so the fear is still probably out there. > As I said elsewhere in this thread months ago, Conservancy works very > very hard to make sure compliance issues don't disrupt a violators' > business. The only way it could possible disrupt their business is if > they spend months and months ignoring Conservancy's requests to work > with us to come into compliance. Even then, Conservancy, in our > enforcement efforts, we continue to look for ways to keep the business > going while we help them come into compliance. Again, if these efforts only target project that explicitly request GPL enforcement, then I think that's OK. >>> That is not true. SFC can't force anybody to comply with the kernel >>> license unless they act on behalf of the copyright holders of the >>> kernel. They can just convince the companies that it is cheaper for >>> them to comply with the kernel license. > >> They can do it as a proxy. > > IMO, this whole discussion is moot: Conservancy now does indeed enforce > directly on behalf of a growing list of Linux copyright holders who > stand alongside BusyBox copyright holders in our enforcement actions. > (And, Samba developers are involved too, for those cases where Samba is > also present.) No, it's not moot. You can only enforce the code that is copyrighted by these Linux developers, which is probably less than 1%. >> There's no need to ignore the license. Companies follow the GPLv2 >> license, yet they avoid busybox for obvious reasons, that apparently >> you are never going to understand. The real world is beyond your >> grasp. > > If they avoid BusyBox, they have to avoid Linux and Samba, too, No, see above. >> it's not surprising that more permissive licenses are on the rise, >> presumably because of the kind of thinking that you show: >> http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-continuing-decline-of-the-gpl/ > > Note that the methodology of the analysis done in that article has been > called into question with competing analysis that shows substantially > different results. See: > http://www.fsf.org/events/is-copyleft-being-framed (a recording of which > is available here http://faif.us/cast/2012/feb/28/0x23/ ). The 451 > Group even covered it here: > http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2012/03/05/thats-not-science/ > > I obviously disagree with 451's Group latest conclusion, since if what > John did in his analysis isn't science, then neither is the work that > 451 Group did. The whole point here is that no one has a proved, > statically valid methodology designed yet to study the rise or decline > of any specific license. We'd need someone who is actually trained in > statistical methods research to really do a study, and I'm not sure it > matters, anyway. Fair enough, but at least some people think it's declining. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
