81–90 of 92 posts
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In my experience, they'll either be much more careful about hiding their reliance, or just strip Linux out of everything. Not contribute back.
Could you give an example? Any company that stripped Linux out of their product?
I'm aware that copyright assignments are often seen as an unnecessary burden to potential contributors, but for large projects like the Linux kernel this actually makes sense. This would have never happed with any GNU project, or OpenLayers, etc.
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> I thought the whole idea of open source was to avoid litigious assholes. How is that? Not sure what you mean. Writing everything from scratch in-house is how you usually avoid litigious assholes. When using someone else's stuff it is a good idea to comply with the licensing terms. That's also a valid strategy to avoid litigation.
> Writing everything from scratch in-house is how you usually avoid litigious assholes. Nah, that just gets you a patent suit.
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If the companies being targeted hadn't violated the GPL, they wouldn't be subject to lawsuits like these. So this is "another reason" not to violate the GPL. It doesn't affect compliant GPL users. > I thought the whole idea of open source was to avoid litigious assholes. It sounds as though you're anti-GPL, so perhaps in this case the distinction between "open source" and GPL-style "free software" is relevant. The GP…
Oh really? Have you ever been involved in litigation? Cases are presented based on arcane points and decided by a nontechnical jury. Trial lawyers focus on jury selection and aren’t interested in facts. Even egregiously false nuisance cases get settled because of reputational risk and cost of litigation.
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I also don't understand how this is even an issue. The companies can make him go away simply by complying with the GPL, no? While what McHardy is doing may not be the most diplomatic stunt, it's kind of hard for me to sympathize when the companies wouldn't have to pay anything if they would just comply with the GPL license . If you don't want to comply with the GPL, use BSD or something. Am I missing something or cou…
If that were true you could resolve a file sharing lawsuit by stopping your torrent client. It doesn’t work like that.
I don't see anybody citing theft. And, quite often, license compliance IS legally resolved by coming into compliance.
However, I still find it hard to sympathize. Don't want this problem--comply with the GPL or don't use GPL software. The GPL is functioning as written and intended.
There is a reason so many companies consider GPL-licensed software to be radioactive.
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If that were true you could resolve a file sharing lawsuit by stopping your torrent client. It doesn’t work like that.
In the case of a torrent, the media companies generally are citing theft (rightly or wrongly) and damages. You can't just resolve theft legally by returning the thing stolen. I don't see anybody citing theft. And, quite often, license compliance IS legally resolved by coming into compliance. However, I still find it hard to sympathize. Don't want this problem--comply with the GPL or don't use GPL software. The GPL is…
That's because it is a concept that doesn't exist. Creating a copy in violation of copyright is not theft.
Copyright is the right to limit others ability to create copies. That limitation doesn't involve things that can be stolen.
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Oh really? Have you ever been involved in litigation? Cases are presented based on arcane points and decided by a nontechnical jury. Trial lawyers focus on jury selection and aren’t interested in facts. Even egregiously false nuisance cases get settled because of reputational risk and cost of litigation.
Sounds like you're not actually here to discuss the GPL or open source.
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Thanks; that's very informative. > The goal of Community-Oriented Enforcement is compliance , not punishment . Is there some record of the debate, if any, that led to this policy? Clearly, financial costs are a deterrent that leads to compliance. Many laws, regulations, and contracts achieve compliance in this manner. That doesn't make the FSF's position wrong, but I wonder how they reached it. The FSF agrees, to an…
> deterrent that leads to compliance Note about general principles: a deterrent needs more than pain to ensure compliance. * There also needs to be a clear path to compliance. If the subject of a rule isn’t capable of complying, they won’t comply. * Knowledge about the possibility of violation & penalty needs to be available to the subject. * There needs to be consistency in what will ensure compliance. Otherwise, th…
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Because there's no legal and/or social infrastructure in place that demands the bounty hunter shares their winnings. The way things are right now, the bounty hunter could argue that the very idea of the statement above is absurd - and that demonstrates how broken things are. I can't help but agree more and more as time goes by that maybe Linux is getting too big for its own good. I do wonder how it'll topple.
There's legal precedent. If one dev proves their copyright was infringed by failure to comply with the contractual obligations set through the OSS license, then the court more than likely will find for every other dev too. The "bounty hunter" will get paid the damages against them, not the damages against the community, there's no reason to disperse them. If someone does a hit-and-run and hits several people with the…
However, the basis of this post was that one person's actions were exploitative from the perspective of the community.
I'm just saying it's sad that there wasn't sufficient precedent of some kind to dissuade what happened from occurring.
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Whats to prevent him? Remove him from development teams,remove his code from sources, and decline his contributions in future. 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.
From the article he made contributions starting at least in 99 (so 20 years ago), it will probably be non-trivial to remove all the code he has previously written. Even if you could remove all the code that he has claim too, that would only be for a future release, and most commercial users of Linux tend to use older, battle tested releases (especially for embedded products.
"[...] as Netfilter substantially existed since 1999, three years before Patrick's first contribution to Netfilter, and five years before joining the core team in 2004."