Software Freedom Conservancy: New Strategy for GPL Enforcement
sfconservancy.org
sfconservancy.org
I see no goodwill from those types, and the simplest explanation for their stance is them being material beneficiaries from that.
People like Patrick McHardy do an enormous service to the Linux community, and he alone provably did more in the last few years than what that GPL conservancy did for its entire existence. Nothing will be more educational than a "GPL death sentence" to some multi-billion dollar multinational like Broadcom. If it will not be McHardys doing the hard work of suing such companies, who will? I don't see those conservancy guys, Linus' associates, or meek Linux Foundation raising a hand on kinds of Qualcomm, or Samsung (from whom, coincidentally, lots of Linux Foundation funding comes)
I completely don't understand people who direct flak on them, and the brouhaha with the "pledge." The only rationale I can fathom, is again is that material beneficiaries of GPL violation have now penetrated the circles who made the "GPL Cooperation Commitment"
Enforcement is a good thing. But the point is to get people complying with the license.
In every confrontation between people, strategies need to adapt when goals fails to be achieved. Even if the goal of McHardy has been to get money, the effect of that strategy might produce more compliance with source than the past strategy of SFC.
Choosing a license and then not caring if the license is upheld seems like you should have chosen another license.
May the standard licensing costs quite high (but not exorbitant) and state that other terms are available if negotiated before using the software.
If they refuse to pay and the amount is large enough, sell the dept to a collections agency and at least cause some inconvenience (though that last part probably won't work across international borders).
Of course if you don't want financial recompense, and open-source-ness is your only concern, then compliance it the only matter to be concerned about. But some people and commercial entities simply won't respect that up-front (so you'll have to fight for compliance) unless non-compliance has an associated cost.
I am assuming their plan doesn't involve mailing out tens of thousands of cheques after victory!
* http://www.netfilter.org/licensing.html#faq - the last question on the FAQ page
* https://opensource.com/article/17/8/patrick-mchardy-and-copy... - This page unfortunately does not demonstrate why he is profiteering
The page also unfortunately does not demonstrate why the people, who self proclaimed themselves "netfilter core team," are so hellbent on arm twisting McHardy into signing on their "Principles."
Linus said that those principles are not a prerequisite for participating in the Linux kernel, but the current netfilter people not only suggest they are, but are ready to scream, shout, mislead, make dodgy insinuations to people, and go wingnut to make contributors sign it.
The second assumption after first presuming them doing this is the goodwill, is them getting good paychecks from network devices owners who benefit from various extends of erosion of GPL terms.
A response to legal attacks, justified or not, is that a lot of places with $$$ to fund the GPL work ban GPL as an existential threat, and fund work under more liberal licences.
That shouldn't be a valid get-out for people ignoring the licence terms. But it is the reality and has to be part of the argument / strategy. That's aside from any consideration about the form of the particular legal attacks you refer to.
GPL will sorely missed by FOSS advocates when it's gone.
As a example, I have never seen a gaming company having internal policy against GPL. Developers are limited in including software that would disrupt the primary business model, but otherwise limiting developers on what they can do when experimenting or internally developing would only delay launches and steal developer time which could be allocated to improve the game.
The much of the *BSD family whose pretty much only point of existence over GNU was its use of permissive license is there laying around, with their devs almost begging for somebody to take their code, and fund their work.
And still, how many of those companies went, and chose FreeBSD over Linux? Not many, very likely just single digits. Most continue skulking, squabbling, crying, facing lawsuits, lose money, face, but they still continue to bite the bitter fruit, which is Linux.
The simple truth is that they have no alternative to Linux, and they don't have resources to make an OS of their own, or bring the numerous permissively licensed "Linux killers" to usable state.
Well, Apple is at 14% of the smartphone market globally and that's derived from BSD, Macs are smaller but also BSD.
The OS is just one case, it's hard to catch up with Linux, but that has not stopped Fuschia (BSD/MIT/Apache) and proprietary, nor SaaS where Linux powers it but is not "distributed" in GPL terms.
The shape of the future is people are stopping feeding the GPL commons in favour of permissive licenses that the $$$ wants https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/o... shows over half of projects in 2019 are MIT /Apache vs GPL(s), and a steady decline in even GPL3 usage.
I don't know what should be done about enforcement but I do know these realities have to be factored into any useful considering about that.
Yes, that's how it looks. In the long term, I think that will turn out to be a Faustian bargain for users and hackers.
It will be the world the commercial software devs want; a large pool of permissively licensed software that they can pick and choose from to assemble $$$ products (with a number of useful idiots and sometimes even businesses contributing to maintaining the underlying pieces), without having to worry about contributing anything back.
But the dream of a Free Software computing experience, where you can inspect and modify every part of the software you run, will have died.
Plenty of commercial software had source available to at least a big portion of its stack. Either in extra floppies or paying a bit extra.
And there was the whole variations of shareware and PD.
GPL was, is, and will likely be the de-facto one, and only license people call an opensource license for as long as we talk about serious projects outside of webdev realm.
The statistics is skewed as of recently because of the overabundance of GitHub one day projects.
Bringing lawyers in always makes people really defensive. People are unlikely to take risks if there's liability involved. Whether this is good or bad for free software I don't know. Probably not.
Linux needs more leverage over companies. Not necessarily legal leverage.
So
> People are unlikely to take risks if there's liability involved.
people are free to choose inferior products, ways of development, components and libraries, but that would - probably - make them less competitive, so e.g. their investors may become worried.
Not only Linux needs more leverage - it also needs to use it, because otherwise it's a moot point.
Maybe that's the idea of GPL, but certainly not the reality. As long as it more enforcement won't help. But I'm still all for it. Makes sure companies fund better software with better licenses and the GPL ends in the garbage bin of history where it belongs.
Disagree. It's worked great for the Linux kernel.
The GPL works.
> gcc
GCC is a very high quality free software compiler but there were occasions where it let free software ideology get in the way of technical excellence. Fearing proprietary extensions, they actively opposed a plugin system and stable intermediate representation. This led to the creation of LLVM.
The GPL is the reason for many source-code contributions. Compare this to the way Sony use FreeBSD to power their PS3 and PS4 consoles and contribute little back to the FreeBSD project.
There are other reasons companies may contribute changes, including that it spares them the trouble of rebasing their fork, and it may earn them goodwill, but copyleft is a strong reason too.
A good concrete example really is that of compilers. Apple used to begrudgingly contribute code to GCC, as the GPL required them to. LLVM has no such requirement, so we see proprietary forks crop up. [0] If I were to contribute to a project like GCC or LLVM, I'd rather my work didn't end up in some non-Free fork.
That Apple later invested in LLVM turned out to be pretty great for everyone. GCC is still doing fine, and we have another industry-strength Free Software compiler suite. I'd rather Apple didn't use a proprietary fork for their own secret-sauce, but I can't be too grumpy given how well LLVM/Clang has done.
> there were occasions where it let free software ideology get in the way of technical excellence
It's an FSF project, so this criticism doesn't really land. FSF projects are not aiming for technical excellence at any cost. It's a bit like saying Free-range ideology gets in the way of my food budgeting.
I don't know much about the specifics of GCC here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Optimizing_C/C%2B%2B_Compi...
So follow the license? If you built a business on pirating Windows, nobody would be surprised when MS murdered you in court. Why should Linux be any different?
Whatever the movement is 'trying to do' is not the point so much as 'what will happen' because of the incentives and thinking process (ie risk mitigation) at most companies.
Most of these licences are untested in court and that's a very bad thing for everyone. So in a way, a bunch of clear and settled cases would provide the 'best path forward' because then we'd know where the lines are - but - a bunch of 'weird outcomes' that cost other companies bazillions would probably hurt a lot and it will strike fast. You won't be able to get your investment if your flirting with a situation in which some other corp got banged for $2B, even if technically you are in the clear.
It's probably a very bad idea to 'sue for money'. The objective of the legal cases should be 'clarity' and the cases should be chosen on that basis if the open source community really wants to thrive.
But legal jurisdictions defer to one another, to the point wherein that is even becoming more formalized, especially for smaller countries [1]. And it's possible that an IP ruling in 'some important place' sets the material precedent anyhow.
If the US or EU rules one way, then others will be influenced by that on some level.
A lot of this could possibly be more clarified by legislation, but I only think the EU and maybe the UK really have the wherewithal or importance to make an impact. Germany possibly but I see them wanting to do that at the EU level. I don't see anything on the horizon for the US.
I would definitely double down on my heretofore down-voted statement: if you care about open source, you really, really want to have 'good, clean cases' pushed through and tested in the courts.
If Open Source proponents leave it to the wind, patent trolls, or big corps - you may see 'bad cases' go through the system and set really bad precedent that hinges on weird corners cases.
Do not underestimate how much of a big deal this is. IP is a discussion at every point along the way when contemplating investing in independent or internal projects and 'ambiguity' is a huge factor in risk aversion.
All of these IP licences are just 'ideas' waiting to be 'more or less law' when they face legal scrutiny, so if I were the 'God of Open Source' I'd be looking to find cases to build a favourable pipeline to the Supreme Court. Major rulings will have a beneficial impact for everyone.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/law/help/domestic-judgment/canada.php
The 'licenses' which you are describing may be worthless, in that they have no actual meaning. Some more so than others.
Someone could sue over GPL tommorow, goes to the Supreme Court, and the GPL is invalidated and ruled invalid.
Then what? The entire software industry turns upside down.
So when the 'licence has little meaning' and it can be overruled in a court ... then companies are very scared of that and act accordingly - with risk aversion.
In other words the 'GPL' is not 'the GPL'. It's just 'maybe the GPL'. And that is a huge maybe if you're betting the company on it.
To make the 'GPL' actually the 'GPL' and to validate the strategy articulated in your comment - you need to either have 1) laws passed in support of this stuff or 2) have major courts rule on it.
The contracts seem reasonable, it would be nice to have them validated in court.
Copyright, a similar issue, is being tested right now in Oracle v. Google and it's going to have a big impact.
To give you some small hint at how big this issue is: Android is switching from Java to Kotlin over this. Literally the #1 most popular OS in the world has to fundamentally shift gears due to IP litigation risks.
If the laws were clear then either a) Android would have never used Java to begin with or b) Android would have no problem using Java. Instead, we're in limbo. Which is why clear contract laws are good for everyone.
I don't think you understand.
That's the equivalent of someone asking about relationship advice on the internet and getting all this "dump her" / "dump him" advice when really what's needed is a little more communication.
I would say a majority of the work in open software comes various forms of corporate sponsorship via sort of unofficial work from their employees.
You ask for "GPL death sentence" and you'll end up with a lot more Apple Computer employees who are for all practical purposes unable to work on any GPL projects.
Everything will be MIT and sharing changes will be withheld for the tiniest of reasons.
There are already plenty of reasons to shy away no matter how good it is for everyone.
Destroy your enemies by making them your friends.
Apples is free to go back 20 years, and copy *BSD userspace instead of GNU, which it used for 15 out of 20 years. They are completely free to chose Microsoft Trident instead kHTML for the browser engine. The are completely free to do the same for hundreds of other GPL libs they used in their commercial products.
They are 100% free to do that... If they can pull it out. The thing is they chose it, because they couldn't make anything else work.
Apples militantly opposes GPL, is a freeloader, was actively working around GPL legal language, and it uses DRM, and they are rumoured to be behind much of anti-GPL publicity campaigns. No, they are not good players at all, and will never be.
Is that so? Which examples do you have where Apple freeloads some GPL software? As far as I can tell Apple stopped adopting any GPL-3 code and effectively has stopped updating GPL-2 dependencies. They are in the process of completely removing it.
On the other hand Apple still contributes actively to a lot of non GPL licensed Open Source code including LLVM.
Which is why Linux on embedded is facing competition full of non-copyleft based OSes.
NutXX, RTOS, Azure RTOS, mbed, Arduino, Zephyr (ironically from Linux Foundation partners), Fuchsia, ....
To give you an example, I had access to the complete ThreadX source code a while ago as my employer back then was a licensee. Making functional changes to that code was a complete no go because that would instantly invalidate its certification and put the onus of recertification on us. And we wouldn't have been able to pull that off at all.
Given those restrictions, the actual software license barely matters.
BS, both have certified "edition" but the "normal" version is not, you can start today send patches for RTOS in.
Sometimes they are different (FIPS enabled etc), but that does not stop you working on that project.
>But they still take on full responsibility for each and every patch going into the codebase.
That's how ~every single OSS project works.
I've also gone through the Github history of the FreeRTOS project. The only merged PR that I could find that was not made by a FreeRTOS team member and touched the kernel was a series of whitespace changes.
Being POSIX compatible is hardly something that most IoT vendors care about.
I certainly wouldn't want self-driving car systems to be powered by Linux...
To my knowledge there was never an incident where common OS was responsible for failure, but it has been a myth for ages.
If it does fail it is probably due to a hardware defect, but a risk analysis would show a plethora of possibilities for fail safe systems.
From the Firmware Liberation Project page[0]:
"Second, depending on what subindustry (i.e., specific class of devices) seems most responsive to increased enforcement activity and willing to provide compliant source releases quickly, we will launch, coordinate and fund an alternative firmware project for that class, or, if appropriate, merge our efforts with an existing alternative firmware project for that class of device."
It is hard to read that as anything but an incentive for vendors to be less responsive, in the hopes that the SFC focus their efforts elsewhere.
[0] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...
Sadly, there was no big switch to IPv6 and double NAT is the thing now.
First slide on the topic at 13:55
Returns to the slide at 17:20
If I remember correctly, somewhere else in the talk he says something like, "I don't think we need GPLv3 for this", but I don't remember where (earlier or later) and don't have time to re-watch the whole talk to hunt for it right now.
(edit: although I think he still prefers v3 / thinks it is stronger. Really you should just watch the talk instead of taking my memory of what he said for granted)
Meanwhile, billions of Linux-based Android devices have locked down bootloaders like the parent comment said.
They aren't entitled to violate the terms of the GPL. They aren't entitled to sell unauthorised copies of Disney DVDs either, and for the same reasons. Compliance with copyright law, and compliance with the licence terms of software that doesn't belong to you, are not optional.
Raising awareness and offering alternatives all seems good, but I still hope litigation is a last ditch effort.
Actually it would be so simple: I give you source code, you give me changes back, we're even. [...] If you make hardware that locks down software, it's your decision as a hardware maker; it has no impact on my decision as a software maker to give you the software. [...] To me the important part was always: I give you software, you can do whatever you want with it; if you make improvements, you have to give them back. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU).
I wonder if GPL3 didn't have quite so many changes if it would have been more widely accepted.
But listening to RMS he said he didn't realize that companies would "tivoize" everything so he added:
"(0) The freedom to run the program as you wish, for whatever purpose."
Personally I think it kind of sucks that much of computing coming out nowadays has locked bootloaders.
Good software, which is not used due to (unnecessary) legal uncertainties, and thus cannot benefit from the support of potent companies, is of no use to anyone, neither in the short nor the long term. The sooner legal uncertainties are removed, the better. Unfortunately, companies avoid legal disputes, often at all costs; that is why it is so easy to blackmail them with out-of-court, very often unfounded claims from patent and copyright law.
When I buy a product, I want it to work well and have good value for money. For this it is irrelevant if the bootloader is locked. If I want to make a system to tinker where I can replace the firmware, I buy a Raspi. The Raspi also benefits from contributions from companies that use Linux in devices where I might not be able to replace the system.
It is similar in most other jurisdictions too, but wording predominates in practice.
EDIT: clarifications
What if a clause is ambiguous to benefit both parties equally, but not at the same time? Are both parties forbidden to act on their own in those cases?