Rich Felker wrote at 13:14 (EDT) on Monday: > My view is that if an author don't want copyleft to be enforced, they > should choose a permissive license.
I agree that would be preferable (and since most permissive licenses are compatible with GPL, one could submit, say, patches to BusyBox that were licensed under the 2-Clause BSD). But, in reality, most people are lazy, so I don't really blame them for submitted patches under GPLv2 to BusyBox and then later choosing not to enforce. Indeed, enforcement is a lot of work and effort, and it's quite boring in most cases. This is what Conservancy exists to do: take care of the boring work so that developers don't have to. But, particularly when a project doesn't have an org like Conservancy behind them (as BusyBox does), I understand fully if they don't want to bother with enforcement. > the effective result of being GPL is that only parties with sufficient > money/power can use the code as if it were permissive-licensed, while > everybody else is forced to treat it as GPL. I see your point generally, but actually, it ends up working out the other way when copyright holders for a given project don't enforce at all. Big companies can't possibly take the risk of not complying (even if they know the license is unlikely to be enforced), while small fly-by-night companies "get away" with GPL violations. I actually feel bad for the big companies in that case, because of their size, they're forced to bear a cost that their cut-rate competitors don't have to. It's one of the reasons most Conservancy enforcement is against these fly-by-night types: they are unfairly undercutting their competition by failing to comply. Compliance isn't expensive, but it's not zero-cost either. >> Meanwhile, I think it's really important that we don't bifurcate the >> community over this issue. > Unenforced GPL is basically like giving a permissive license to big > companies while sticking free software developers with the red tape of > the GPL. I agree fully that the GPL should be enforced. Indeed, I feel so strongly about it that I personally do a large share of the entire world-wide work in enforcing GPL. But, I don't think it's fair to give a hard time to those who chose not to enforce. While I agree with many of your arguments (modulo changes above), my main criticism is that you seem to be unduly giving a hard time to those people who chose not to enforce. If for no other reason, we should keep in mind that those who don't do GPL enforcement with us today are potential allies who may change their minds about GPL enforcement in the future. We should treat them like the potential allies that they are, rather than condemn them for not having the time/inclination to do enforcement now. -- -- bkuhn _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
