GPL enforcement is a social good | Hacker News Reader

GPL enforcement is a social good

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

121 pointsteddyh18 comments

I donated and you should too. https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ You get a t-shirt and your name/company publicly listed as a supporter (if you want). They're a charity, for tax purposes.

More importantly, they use their money efficiently and have tangible positive results.

Unfortunately due to the VMware lawsuit they've lost some corporate sponsors. Note that on the whole, their GPL enforcement is not litigious and not profitable. And that's just one part of their overall mission.

I donated. Find my name here: http://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/

For people searching: logn's donation is credited as "Machine Publishers, LLC".

I donated as well, the "use their money efficiently and have tangible positive results" seems especially true.

I used to be an FSF member, but with all the different things they do it's hard to get an idea of whether they're spending it on the things I care about. The Software Freedom Conservancy seems more focused and working on things I care about.

Remember that Git, Mercurial and many other important projects are Software Freedom Conservancy members.

I wonder which corporate sponsor they lost and what the reason was? Was it just a co-incidence or was the sponsor supportive of VMware's alleged GPL violations?

Bradley Kuhn has asked, "do you think I should be doing what I'm doing?" He doesn't believe he has a right to work on GPL enforcement. That's up to us to decide, by giving his organisation money or not:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/

If you find yourself with the opportunity to see Bradley Kuhn speak I'd highly recommend it. I met Bradley at the Linux Fest North West event this year in April and it was one of my favourite and most formative moments of the year. I'm proud to be a financial supporter of the Conservancy with all the work that they do to protect and promote Free Software.

In Germany, Harald Welte has taken on several hardware vendors over GPL violations.

I wonder why vendors that build, like, SOHO routers and Wifi access points go through the effort it takes to violate the GPL instead of using a BSD base (where making modifications to the codebase and keeping them closed is at least legal). It's kind of like breaking into bank while next door there is a guy giving money away for free.

As I was reading your sentence "go through the effort it takes to violate the GPL instead of..." I was expecting the "instead of" to be just publish the necessary source code. That seems pretty easy to me. It's probably easier than trying to get non-GPL versions of things like Linux, which tends to have more widespread hardware support (like, a full set of drivers) than, say, NetBSD. And I say "probably" because I expect these companies have been taking the easy way out.

The BSDs still have to rely on Linux compatibility layers in order to use Linux drivers, right?

The BSDs have their own drivers, they don't use Linux drivers.

Isn't the nvidia blob used through a Linux compatibility layer?

Because Linux has a stronger ecosystem for many tasks, and the kind of people that don't want to put forth any effort to comply with the license is highly correlated with being the kind of person who doesn't want to work on anything hard. If Linux has the radio driver already and BSD doesn't, the decision is already made, from their perspective.

There are other factors, sure, and if I were a company that didn't want to comply with the GPL, I'd certainly be using BSD code instead. But, if the "free money" at the bank next door requires them to work, they aren't doing it. They seem to reckon that stealing GPL code is the path of least resistance. Which, I guess, is why enforcement of the GPL is so important; without making it cost something to violate the GPL, there's no motivation for companies to be good citizens in the Free software community. It also seems like enforcement of the GPL is good for BSD (or, at least, good for BSD adoption, if not for contribution, since these are folks who don't want to expend even a tiny amount of effort/money to contribute back, which is why there's a violation in the first place), since the effort/cost for making BSD-licensed stuff work for these companies doesn't change as the cost of making GPL work goes up.

I only see monthly/annual support. Do they have a one-time listed anywhere that I'm not seeing?

You can make one-time donation here: http://sfconservancy.org/donate/

Wow, this is too confusing. I don't understand what SFC claims to do. This post seems to conflate two separate concepts. One is people should use open source, and two people abuse open source. Enforcing GPL implies the second, yet the article kept alluding to the first. And the FUD... a toy is not going to stop working because of API mortality (what is that?) And most embedded devices aren't going to be vulnerable, even with "old" code. And while it might be cool to hack your barbie doll, only a handful of people are going to do that.

Rob Landley (former Busybox developer) begs to differ.

See http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011 http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#15-08-2011 http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#15-12-2009

Not really - I'd say he's showing concern with the execution rather than the idea of enforcement. The other thing I got is he hates GPLv3 (but not v2), and also is not a fan of the BSD license:

> My only real concern about a BSD license is it lets for-profit corporations hire your developers away to work on a proprietary fork (as I ranted about here and here). This is why BSD the operating system has never amounted to anything: Sun looted them in 1982, BSDi looted them in 1989, and Apple looted them a third time around 1997 and never stopped stopped. (None of which explain why Free, Open, and Net are separate projects.)

> But honestly, I think the FSF has now made the GPL more of a liability than an asset. I've spoken on panels defending the GPL but GPLv3 was a career limiting move. LLVM and PCC and Android are all organizations that were fine with GPLv2, until it got painted with the same brush as GPLv3 and the contamination spread to cloud the old thing

The principles SFC operates their GPL compliance efforts under are eminently reasonable. They aren't going to sue anyone into the ground, they just want GPL compliance and reasonable coverage of legal expenses.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

I am an advocate of open source. One time I had a laptop running Linux that I couldn't get the wi-fi driver working for. Eventually after searching the internet I found that the driver was linking to a restricted syscall, so I recomipled the driver, to change a variable claiming it was mit-licenced (it wasn't) and then the wi-fi driver worked.

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