Also, how is this a victory by Linux? I see no mention of activity by the rest of the Linux community while Geniatech fought the legal battle.
The companies can make him go away simply by complying with the GPL, no?
While what McHardy is doing may not be the most diplomatic stunt, it's kind of hard for me to sympathize when the companies wouldn't have to pay anything if they would just comply with the GPL license.
If you don't want to comply with the GPL, use BSD or something.
Am I missing something or could these companies sidestep all the legal BS with a minimal amount of effort.
That's not clear. If you copy someone's work and don't have a license to use it then you've violated the copyright holder's rights. Just because you come into compliance with a license to copy the work doesn't absolve the violating party of the original liability.
Additionally, there is some disagreement specifically around the GPLv2 and license re-instatement; specifically, it's not clear that license re-instatement is possible in the face of unwilling copyright holders.
I don't see anybody citing theft. And, quite often, license compliance IS legally resolved by coming into compliance.
However, I still find it hard to sympathize. Don't want this problem--comply with the GPL or don't use GPL software. The GPL is functioning as written and intended.
There is a reason so many companies consider GPL-licensed software to be radioactive.
That's because it is a concept that doesn't exist. Creating a copy in violation of copyright is not theft.
Copyright is the right to limit others ability to create copies. That limitation doesn't involve things that can be stolen.
The Linux community suspended McHardy from being a core developer. The stable branch maintainer said the lawsuits "have threatened the confidence in our ecosystem". And the technical advisory board is asking developers to sign a statement that they are not seeking financial gain.
"sworn affidavits of senior kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman and current netfilter maintainer Pablo Neira were presented in support of some of [Geniatech's] claims. The contents of those are unfortunately not public, neither is the contents of the sworn affidavists presented by the plaintiff."
Follow his activities(news about law suits are followed by FSF and GNU anyway) and contact litigators to inform them that he does not represent any open source contributions for these groups.
Then he has no leg to stand (and sue) on.
Even if you could remove all the code that he has claim too, that would only be for a future release, and most commercial users of Linux tend to use older, battle tested releases (especially for embedded products.
"[...] as Netfilter substantially existed since 1999, three years before Patrick's first contribution to Netfilter, and five years before joining the core team in 2004."