Daniel Berlin wrote: > Enforcing compliance with laws is expensive in every case.
I agree with that. > IMHO, even if bradley had an entire 300 person law firm dealing with > violations, you wouldn't see much difference in behavior :) Actually, I somewhat disagree with that. While the number of GPL violations has certainly gone up huge amounts over the last 15 years, I suspect the *percentage* of "number of copies of a GPL'd program distributed out of compliance" is about the same as what we found in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the amount of enforcement hasn't really increased to match. There was a (short) period when Harald, FSF *and* Conservancy were all very active in enforcement -- at that moment, things were clearly getting much better. Many of those improvements have survived. Now, gpl-violations.org isn't active (but thankfully they keep the list running for us :), I personally took a break from doing any enforcement for a bit immediately after the big Conservancy lawsuit, and while both Conservancy and FSF are active in enforcement right now, we're probably in aggregate doing less enforcement than it was at its best. If we as a community could scale up just a bit, I think compliance behavior would improve. (There are a few big "nuts to crack" there related to upstream problems, but those are solvable with volume.) Anyway, I'm doing my best but it's tough work to fund (as you mention), and both Conservancy and FSF have a lot of other work to do that isn't enforcement that's also very important for software freedom. I'd like to see another entity ramp up, but the problem is it has to be structured well. It's easy for enforcement work to become corrupt (see Oracle's MySQL enforcement for details :). > I'm not sure the right balance exists now, but it's not that simple. I agree with this too. -- bkuhn
