Hello, I have downloaded your pdf and find it very interesting. I have looked at the table of contents but not yet read it, which I will do in detail. Since I have worked with the FSFE since 2006, I am quite familiar with the GPLv2 and AGPLv3 but am very far from being an expert.
I write to you as an open source software developer (originally APCUPSD, and now since 2000 Bacula -- currently AGPLv3). I suspect that your tutorial might be mostly directed at companies wanting to use GPL code. It would also be very useful to have information for developers. In particular, where I personally am unsure (please excuse me if these topics are already covered): 1. Exactly who has the right to bring a lawsuit for copyright violation? 2. What happens when a developer (holding copyright assignments from all contributors) signs an FLA with say the FSFE (as was my case in 2006)? 3. What happens if this developer subsequently requests and obtains FLAs from all the contributors who signed an FLA with the FSFE? Does he then have a dual license? 4. What is required to cancel or "annul" an FLA? Can it be done by a simple letter or must it be done through a court of law providing the FLA holder does not agree to cancel or annul the FLA? For me these are interesting questions because they touch me personally. To be transparent the above scenario has happened to me with the Bacula project due to the fact that I created a open source company named Bacula Systems to provide professions services for Bacula, but later (when it was failing) converted the company into an open-core company with parts of the code proprietary justified by the fact that I believe that I hold a dual license. This is actuality, if it is not a topic for discussion on this list, please tell me as I do not wish to create useless chatter on your list. Best regards, Kern Sibbald Lausanne, Switzerland On 04/24/2014 09:59 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:19 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Here's a brief list of the main things I ask for on a new enforcement >>> matter: >>> Some of this is already in the tutorial book I've been putting together >>> (see: https://www.gitorious.org/gpl-compliance-tools/tutorial/ ) > Robinson Tryon wrote: >> Is there a place where builds of the compliance book are uploaded? It could >> be very helpful to be able to point directly at this type of basic >> checklist, e.g. when someone new shows up to this list with a potential GPL >> violation and asks for our help. > First, it's more than just a compliance book. There's only two sections on > compliance. Most of it is a detailed walk-through of GPL. I've titled it: > "Copyleft and the GNU General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial", and > thus it has to cover compliance and enforcement (after all), but not > exclusively those topics. > > Second, there's no auto build process for the LaTeX sources (patches welcome > ;), but I've been keeping a current PDF [0] version on a URL of my personal > website: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/copyleft-book.pdf > > I will make sure that URL is permanently stable and redirects to the "right > place" if there ever is a "right place" in the future. :) > > Finally, the compliance section is written as "advice to would-be violators". > I wrote it originally as a document to help me prepare when I started giving > public talks on the issues of GPL compliance back in the mid-2000s, and it's > been edited heavily by both me and Aaron Williamson since then, but ultimately > it's still just a summary of what I talk about in one-hour presentation > on compliance. > > Thus, the info isn't presented in the best possible way for the average poster > on this list (who are mostly violation reporters/discoverers, not violators). > > I'd thus love a chapter that discussed "advice to violation reporters and > investigators", and as I said, patches/merge-requests welcome under > CC-By-SA-4.0. :) > > > Long term, I want to write a CCS tutorial chapter too. > > When there are major updates, I'll post notice to this list. > > > [0] The HTML build of from LaTeX sources is broken at the moment. tex4ht has > changed a lot since I set it up, and since the LaTeX sources were taken > from nearly a dozen different historical documents that I and others had > written, there isn't consistent use of tex4ht-isms to properly generate > HTML. > > (Man, this thing needs an issue tracker as well now, huh? I'll file a > bug that I need a bug tracker ... <Segmentation fault> ;) > > -- bkuhn >
