On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. I think we don't really disagree except in what we believe the impact would be. I guess i'm infinitely more cynical than you :) I would actually go so far as to say "behavior of mid-to-to-large companies in the US and Europe would improve", but I think it will slowly improve anyway. I don't think there is much hope for the rest anytime soon. Happy to see you prove me wrong though. The honest truth is that the more work you do, the less work i have to do later when we acquire them :)
