Robinson Tryon wrote on Thursday, 17 April: > in the general case, I hope that employers would not be able to quash > an employee's personal, non-work-time hobby of GPL enforcement.
I wish that were true as well, but it's merely a wish, sadly. > Is there anything specific that could be done to reduce the > possibility of reprisal from an employer? It's relatively simple: we need more Linux developers to publicly say they want to see the GPL enforced, and to even do some enforcement. > I assume that in the process of bringing suit against a company, the > names of all copyright holders would be made public, so masking > identity to avoid harassment wouldn't work. Indeed. Of course, we can keep names confidential until such time as a suit needs to be filed -- and most of the more than a dozen copyright holders who are involved in the GPL Compliance program for Linux developers are anonymous. So, instead, I take the political heat and attacks from the industry bigwigs who claim I'm the same as a patent troll because I don't release the names of all the copyright holders. That's good politics on their part: scare people so they don't want their names known, and then attack the person who helps those scared people stand up for their rights. This is the industry we all work in. I wish others would realize how politically dangerous it is to enforce the GPL. I've basically made it so my only job prospects forever are in non-profit organizations or outside of computing entirely. It's what I wanted anyway, so it's not that bad for me, but I'm pretty clearly blacklisted from every working at any Linux-related company because of my GPL enforcement work. > I can certainly imagine that many such "Linux"-related companies would > be annoyed with the work you do regarding GPL enforcement, as they'd > much rather pretend that the kernel Linux and other pieces of software > may be used willy-nilly. Actually, I think most of the major Linux companies prefer to pretend Linux is LGPL'd. They're fine with upstreaming core subsystem stuff, but they believe anything that isn't a core subsystem should be proprietary if they want it to be. > They see you and your colleagues as an impediment to their desire to > ship a proprietary product, and the GPL as a mechanism that might > allow others to reuse their work. It's that, but not only that. It's also that these companies believe if the GPL is ever known to exist, it will "hurt adoption of Linux". That's why industry trade associations and the like also oppose GPL enforcement: adoption is more important than software freedom. Ironically, that's the classic non-copyleft/copyleft tradeoff we've talked about in the Free Software community since the early 1990s. And, many Linux developers including Linus himself have said they don't think Linux would have succeeded if it weren't copylefted. But, good politicians rewrite history to suit them. Now that Linux is successful and GPL violations on it are rampant, those industry folks want to pretend that copyleft doesn't matter (or, at least, strong copyleft doesn't). > I am a bit surprised to hear that companies are working so hard to > squelch your work. I figured people on this list would be surprised by this; that's one reason why I decided to share this on the list. > Do the companies not understand the GPL, or are they willfully > violating it because they don't think anyone will bother to enforce > it? Some companies against enforcement actually are generally pretty compliant. They just have this irrational fear that they'll lose customers if the GPL is enforced. If that were true, of course, they'd have lost customers already since Harald and I have been enforcing the GPL for decades now. Others companies are known violators who play at the edges of the fundamental "what makes something a combined and/or derivative work"? They know they are right on the line, and they are working hard to make it difficult for me to challenge them on this. And, it's quite expensive for an individual or a non-profit to challenge a wealthy company that's hell-bent on infringing your copyrights. That issue is currently the fundamental center of my GPL enforcement work now. > To what extent would further education at the developer/engineer level > help? Telling Linux developers that we need their support -- in a friendly, non-confrontational way -- is what's needed most. Angry posts like some on this list make to LKML or other places aren't helping. What helps is to tell Linux developers that even if they only have a few hundred lines of code upstream, they should get in touch with me at the GPL Compliance program for Linux developers. Second, and probably more importantly: encourage Linux developers you know to insist that their employers let them keep their own copyright. There are a fewer and fewer Linux developers who actually have their own copyrights. This is by design of these companies: they know that without copyrights, enforcement doesn't happen. Notwithstanding this list regulars' obsession with non-copyright-holder methods of enforcement, we *don't* have a clear working mechanism to enforce the GPL that doesn't require holding copyright. Individuals need to be the largest single copyright holder in Linux for a good, secure future of Linux. -- -- bkuhn
