The Linux Foundation in 2020 Helps Serial GPL Violators Get Away with It | Hacker News Reader

The Linux Foundation in 2020 Helps Serial GPL Violators Get Away with It

techrights.org

19 pointsURfejk8 comments

This was confusing, the actual article is after a big 'quote' from Microsoft. The meat of the article is:

  Linux Foundation lawyers are now literally recommending omitting copyright holders’ names and copyright dates from copyright notices in source code. Why would a lawyer recommend something so dumb? This is an obvious attempt to try to hinder GPL enforcement

I'll try to make sense of this.

Most of these pertain to allowing others to use the copyrighted work, e.g. licensing. In a work for hire, the author (natural person) assigns this to whoever hired him (e.g. his employer)

But in Europe (but, I believe, not in the USA), there is a non-transferable moral right on fathership (rough translation for vaderschapsrecht), the right to let the world know that you wrote the code. This right cannot be assigned to someone else. So if a European employee works for Microsoft, and writes a driver for Linux, the employee probably has the right to require his name to appear in the copyright message.

It seems this article tells authors to not claim this right and remain anonymous.

How this hinders GPL enforcement isn't clear to me. It might muddy the waters about who owns the code right now, hence removing standing - You can't generally sue someone for infringing a copyright that is not yours, the current owner has to sue.

Update: The source is this: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/01/copyright-notic...

And there is some interesting stuff under : Why not list every copyright holder?

It seems very strange to me that a lawyer writes this:

  The specific individual or legal entity that owns the copyright might not be known to the contributor; it could be you, your employer, or some other entity.

He considers it acceptable to contribute even if the actual ownership is not clear. If you don't know who owns a contribution, how can the owner agree to contribute?

I believe the quote/screenshot is from Linux Foundation. But yes, confusing. And no actual argument or discussion of the problem.

I honestly don't see what the harm is supposed to be. What is the purported effect of a broader attribution in the copyright header?

Back in January, Steve Winslow from the Linux Foundation (LF) published a blog post https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/01/copyright-notic... that effectively promoted the idea that copyright notices in LF projects should use a format similar to:

* Copyright The XYZ Authors.

* Copyright The XYZ Contributors.

* Copyright Contributors to the XYZ project.

The main characteristics is that (a) no individual copyright holders are named; and (b) no date is present.

By using this format, you skip all the tedious updates of copyright notices every time a new copyright holder touches a file, or every new year.

In his blog post, he also specifies that this is only a recommendation, and if a contributor insist, they can always add another line mentioning their name, for example:

How this has anything to do with violations, LF helping serial violators get away, etc.... is beyond my comprehension.

I wish this made more sense to me, can someone help decipher this to someone who lacks context?

I'm always working on open source code and Linux but I have to be honest, I really don't understand the licensing outside of the very basics.

My understanding of why this might be bad for open source is that it means, code might end up being littered with GPL and Non-GPL contributions?

But would that actually be possible if the project where the contribution is made is GPL?

Thanks in advance!

This articled (dated few days ago) gave me more context: http://techrights.org/2020/08/21/last-article/

It did? It seems again to be a "who said what" without actually addressing where the meat of the claim comes from. (which tbh is the impression I've gotten from nearly every article on that domain...)

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