If Linux is going to just use "soft" mechanisms to force the hands of MegaCorps when they do blatant license/copyright violations, then they might as well put a fork in the GPL, call it done, and switch to BSD3 or MIT+Apache or something. And before people yell at me, this is precisely how LLVM operates; the project does not use strong copyleft licensing, but purely technical means, to "force" upstream cooperation, due to factors like APIs churn and extremely high development velocity. And it seems to work pretty well, actually, without watering down their respective chosen license.
If someone starts the ball rolling, it's a long and expensive legal battle with tons of parties involved. Consider the Oracle v Google lawsuit which started in 2010 and was resolved in 2021.
With the number of companies involved in the kernel you are looking at a much longer and more expensive trial all around.
This has always been the weakness of both the GPL and the US civil justice system.
The suit in this case would be for compliance with the GPL.
Discovery and attorney fees would be a big portion of the picture here. If there's no settlement reached, each party will have a right to collect and comb through documents related to the lawsuit. Further, they'd have the right to interview (take a deposition of) everyone involved in decisions surrounding the controversy.
That means, nVidia would (likely) have the right to start talking to people in HP, Intel, AMD, Oracle, broadcom, On semiconductor, etc. Practically anyone involved with kernel development and decision making around kernel development.
The US civil legal system is designed to try and force parties into settlement. However, when you have a major corporation with cash to burn, they can win simply by dragging everything out.
Are they? Because big companies seem to sue each other all the time, even while actively collaborating in other areas. Is Linus suing NVIDIA for blatantly working around technical measures to prevent copyright infringement really worse than Apple suing Samsung for selling phones that look like theirs, or than Oracle suing Google because they made Java-compatible APIs?
> If someone starts the ball rolling, it's a long and expensive legal battle with tons of parties involved. Consider the Oracle v Google lawsuit which started in 2010 and was resolved in 2021.
Sounds more like normal "war". Yeah, you'd have to figure out who would finance Linus' side, but it doesn't seem like it should be that difficult.
> With the number of companies involved in the kernel you are looking at a much longer and more expensive trial all around.
Why would other companies be involved? Linus doesn't have to sue everyone, he can just sue NVIDIA. Other companies might submit briefs, but that would be voluntary.
In a civil lawsuit, both parties are entitled to "discovery" which means knowing what the other party knows about the controversy in question. It would be reasonable discovery for nVidia to want interviews with engineers in HP that have contributed to kernel development. Whether these companies want to be involved in the lawsuit or not, they'll get dragged in because they've directly participated in kernel development and/or governance.
Now, discovery isn't unlimited, so it's possible for a judge to say "actually, this steps too far, you only need to talk to linus" but that's in no means a guarantee.
https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/lawsuits-and-the-co...
It's the first I've heard of it, but maybe I'm just too out of the loop.
I work daily with LLVM and haven't noticed any slowdown in contributions by employees from Google or Apple.
That being said, even in the alternate universe where Linus decided to relicense to GPLv3 + syscall exception[0], they could still make a normal infringement claim on the GPL copyleft. DMCA 1201 claims are just a really ironic thing to add to such a lawsuit.
[0] TiVo clause be damned
> Given that symbol_get was only ever intended for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls lawsuits.
Which is such a lovely way of putting it. Of making a mock of Nvidia obviously flouting all intent & regard & doing whatever the heck they want.
>Let's be clear about this: lawsuits destroy. They don't "protect". Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice.
It's also worth noting that, in 2016 when Linus shared this view, NVIDIA's market cap was 60B. It's now 1200B: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/market...
At some point, when you have a trillion dollar entity acting in bad faith for that long, maybe your only option left (besides giving them the finger) is to pursue them in courts.
[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members (I had to grep the HTML to find it)