The GPL-Violations.org Project (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The GPL-Violations.org Project (2016)

gpl-violations.org

If you manage a website like this, I implore you to spend an hour and think about someones first-time experience when they land on your site.

- The logo goes to the homepage

- the "gpl-violations.org" link goes to the homepage

- the page title goes to the homepage

- About describes the goal of the project and who's behind it, but not how to access the project... or if that's even a thing.

- The GPL page lists the GPL itself

- FAQ has a drop down... for four pages that I don't have the context to pick from? Who is this site for? The categories also aren't the same. Some are people (Vendors) others are topics (Legal).

Beyond reading those pages, as an individual landing on the page I'm exhausted at trying to find out what gpl-violations.org does.

> The gpl-violations.org project tries to raise public awareness about past and present infringing use(r)s of GPL licensed software.

Yes, but _what do you do_? Email people? Run marketing campaigns?

> The project wants to act as information and communication platform between all parties involved with licensing of free software

Where is this platform? How do I access it? Is your selling point acting as a liaison? If so, why would you not put a big "contact us" button front and center?

Look, I get that you might not want to design your site to look like a brand-new Bay Area SaaS. I don't want you to do what you don't want! I just want you to think about how to best provide info to the people who visit your website (and who might want to join your cause). And, so far, this ain't it!

Last entry in the news section is from 2016. Looks dead in the water to me.

I guess laforge is doing other things atm, but i guess he at least hasn't called it dead: http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/projects/license-compliance/

> I guess laforge is doing other things atm

Yes. Judging by the reactions here I think most commenters are unfamiliar with Harald Welte, prolific Free Software hacker and one-man GPL defender.

For all the noise out of kernel hackers about doing their own enforcement if needed, so any copyright assignment is not necessary, Harald is one of the very few who actually went through the trouble of doing something to keep the kernel GPL instead of "GPL as lipservice, BSD in practice."

You'd think the Linux Foundation would be all over this, but it looks like they prefer to keep the gravy train rolling (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/join/members/).

His current focus is open source mobile communications networks:

https://osmocom.org/

Agreed, this is empty of information.

There's a wikipedia page for the organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org Among other things, it mentions that the website was offline for most of 2015, and while they recovered it, I am not sure if they have been in activity since (whatever their activity is).

My expectation from the URL would have been better served by a perpetually-maintained static html page enumerating GPL violators.

I think they intentionally avoid it, see FAQ:

> Beware the "public shaming" bomb. It's easy to let off, but very hard to defuse if you made a mistake or the issue turned out to be minor and is rapidly resolved.

[1]: http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq/

If you have so many comments, why raise it here and not mail the contact stated at the website? Do you think it is more productive in effecting a change to only post this here, rather than to whoever is responsible?

The answer is in the first sentence

> If you manage a website like this

So it is and advice to whoever manages this kind of website, not just the webmaster of GPL-violations.org

Its a forum. The entire point is to post and discuss things, not to fix the world. If we wanted to do that we would be fixing the world instead of reading hacker news.

One more minor point: http should redirect to https.

I think this summarizes what they do:

"Does gpl-violations actually have any ability to do this ?

In the situations where violations have been found and action taken enforcement has been successful. This includes out of court settlements with several large vendors and a legal injunction against Sitecom. We strive to resolve issues amicably. When this fails we resolve them through legal actions."

"Why do you send warning letters to GPL violators without contacting them first?

When we started enforcing the GPL, we tried it by sending e-mails, faxes and letters ourselves, rather than going through lawyers. However, those letters were simply ignored in almost all cases.

Therefore, it is our experience that trying informal means of communication is not worth the effort, especially since it reduces the amount of time we have for applying to a preliminary injunction (in Germany), and therefore puts us into a worse position.

Formal warning notices sent through our lawyers always tend to draw attention at the appropriate management level, and therefore tend to be addressed with the required seriousness for a major copyright violation. "

Software Freedom Conservancy also work on GPL violations and recently announced a new strategy for achieving GPL compliance.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber... https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-stra...

Reminds me: Bradley and Karen from the Software Freedom Conservancy have a podcast largely about foss legal topics [1]

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/free-as-in-freedom/id4...

Drop the "the", just "Software Freedom Conservancy", it's cleaner. :)

I'd been a fan of them for years before I realized there was no "the".

In spoken language, the people at Conservancy generally call the organization "Conservancy" (no "the") but I believe prefer "the Software Freedom Conservancy" as the full name. It's true that "the" is not in the official name of the organization. In written language they also say "Conservancy" (no "the") for short, but (judging from sfconservancy.org) seem to prefer "Software Freedom Conservancy" (no "the") for the full name.

Is anyone else picturing Jack Black in a record store right now?

I'm confused... Where's the list of violations?

Publicly shaming violators is not the goal of the project.

The only information this site seems to convey then is "the GPL exists and is able to be violated". I'm not sure what use this is?

Perhaps not shaming, but the first sentence on their homepage seems to suggest that they'd have some sort of list:

> The gpl-violations.org project tries to raise public awareness about past and present infringing use(r)s of GPL licensed software.

At any rate, if you click the News link in the navbar, you can find some news with names of entities they've gone after, though nothing is particularly recent.

They have some in the news section: http://gpl-violations.org/news/

The last relevant piece of “news” is from 2013.

I thought maybe the mailing list would have some info, but nope, discontinued, without an archive link.

Skimmed over it, from all those companies they had to sue, only Gigabyte seems to have been cooperative.

That site came out and was popular when D-Link and Cisco were brought to court for violating Welte's copyright, IIRC.

The list of cases was the only interesting thing why I opened the site. Got disappointed

So the website states it's not very well maintained. Last news post was 2016, it's actually not maintained instead of poorly maintained. The mailing list where I thought there would be action between the people behind the project was shut down because of a lack of resources.

Honestly, there doesn't seem much point in this website at all. It seems like a dead project.

What I'd like to know is - do they talk to the authors first?

Yes, they're only able to send notifications if they have an author's copyright to enforce (for a long time it was only Busybox that actually enforced their copyright this way).

wins the ugly site competition.

Don't do this.

Don’t do what...?

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