Linux beats legal threat from one of its own developers

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.

It makes perfect sense to sue a company that fails to comply with the license. What doesn't make sense is for anyone with a two line contribution to the kernel to sue anyone for not complying with the license. I like the way free software enforcement organizations approach this currently. Represent the community as a whole, ask nicely first, sue if that doesn't lead to compliance.

> For example, I have deep disdain for people who build up WordPress or Drupal sites for clients and flat out refuse to let the customer have their code, but that still doesn't mean they should get sued to oblivion, no matter how much I disagree with this practice.

It means that they should comply with the license or possibly face legal consequences. If that means that they'll get sued to oblivion, that's their responsibility. If the customer can't see the code, however, there's a chance that the customer doesn't have a copy of the software (e.g. if it's running on a server that the contractor is maintaining) in which case GPLv2 doesn't give the customer the right to see the code making the example completely irrelevant.

> If you are for open source, you want to actively encourage the use of these platforms (regardless if you think they are trash) instead of having these people move over to some equally bad system. This is worse for the OSS community.

Why would I want to encourage anyone to build a platform using my GPLv2 software if they don't honor the license? Their use of my software gives no value to me if their changes aren't public. If a system is built on a Linux kernel that we never get to see the source of, its value compared to "some equally bad system" is exactly that, equal. It's proprietary software, and the only difference from some other proprietary system is that it's also illegal.

So as the proprietor of a piece of GPL software that gets used illegally, you're given the choice of a) having the non-compliant user continue violating your rights, the free software community having absolutely nothing to gain from it, or b) having the non-compliant user forced by a court to comply with the license, release the contribution and pay damages to you. The choice seems simple.

> It's also worse for the customer, since hidden fees for MS or Oracle will be tacked onto the product price.

In which case the company will have a hard time competing with the many others that are able to honor free software licenses and both benefit from and contribute to the free software community. How bad is that?

> If word got out, even those who follow GPLv2 to a T would have reason to be nervous, so they'd just migrate off the platform as well.

It's a very simple license to honor. If you don't want to honor it it means that you are either too lazy to care about licenses or that you've made changes of a proprietary nature that you don't want to share. Either way, malevolent.

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.

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.