Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Perhaps the employment contracts from Red Hat, MontaVista, etc., prohibit > the employee getting involved with copyright violation in a private > capacity?
Fontana already raised the question about whether you mean someone's own copyrights or copyrights their employers hold under "work for hire" or similar doctrines. The rest of my post assumes we're talking about "copyrights we're sure the developers hold themselves in their own name": I somewhat doubt *any* company restricts by formal agreement what a given employee can do regarding the Free Software they've contributed on their own with their own copyrights -- up to and including filing their own lawsuits. That said, there is definitely a chilling effect: developers are afraid of losing their jobs or facing trouble at work if they even state their opinions in support of GPL enforcement, let alone doing enforcement. I think most people on this list would be surprised to learn and will probably doubt me when I say there is a not-really-coordinated, but nearly universal, effort by many "Linux"-related companies, working very hard to squelch anyone who attempts to enforce the GPL, and doubly so against anyone who coordinates many people together to enforce GPL (like I do). (Of course, I'm talking only about enforcement whose primary goal is full GPL compliance. Enforcement for profit by companies like Oracle does with MySQL is something different entirely, and I guess the business world lauds that.) -- bkuhn
