Marc Dietrich wrote: > Thanks for your help. I replied to your private mail which asked for > evidence on the GPL violation. I think it would be better to discuss these > things openly on this list so others may profit from the documentation of > the process in the future.
I don't have a serious objection to discussing the evidence of the violation publicly, but I hope you understand that since any given GPL violation could turn into a possible later litigation, I usually try to avoid talking about the details of what evidence exists for a specific enforcement matter on any public lists. > What's still looks strange to me is that the GPL gives all the rights to > endusers, but they are now allowed to file a suit? I'm sorry that this thread has been so distracting on this issue. The goal of the GPL is to give certain freedoms to end-users, indeed. However, the primary legal mechanism it uses underneath is copyright, and as such the most traditional way and more or less the only successful way so far the license has been enforced has been through copyright holders acting on their rights. Take a look at GPLv2 Section 4 for the central provision on how this works. You also might want to read the book I wrote much of it and am the primary editor of: http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/comprehensive-gpl-guide.pdf the source of which is here: https://www.gitorious.org/gpl-compliance-tools/tutorial (I guess this my official announcement to this list of that book project. I welcome merge requests. The work is CC-By-SA.) > Instead they have to find an involved developer willing to do it for them? I've dedicated most of my life to making sure that there are good coalitions of such copyright holders to take action in these cases. I look forward to collaborating with you and we always welcome volunteer help. > If this is true, it heavily weakens the GPL. While the system isn't perfect, the Free Software infrastructure work with the legal systems we have: that was the "hack" that RMS discovered to make copyleft work at all. I have nevertheless been very supportive of novel ways to build Free Software licensing structure, but I have yet to hear one that is known to work as well as this one -- even for its flaws. We have the worst system, AFAICT, except for all the other possible ones. I'm also very supportive of pro-bono lawyers (like Brendan Scott in Australia) who have successfully used other legal systems (such as fraud law, in that case) to force action by a GPL violator without copyright holders involved. -- bkuhn
