Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement [LWN.net]

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 19:22 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by fb
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

As the ex-maintainer of busybox who STARTED those lawsuits in the first place and now HUGELY REGRETS ever having done so, I think I'm entitled to stop the lawsuits in whatever way I see fit.

They never resulted ina single line of code added to the busybox repository. They HAVE resulted in more than one company exiting Linux development entirely and switching to non-Linux operating systems for their embedded products, and they're a big part of the reason behind Android's "No GPL in userspace" policy. (Which is Google, not Sony.)

Toybox is my project. I've been doing it since 2006 because I believe I can write a better project than busybox from an engineering perspective. I mothballed it because BusyBox had a 10 year headstart so I didn't think it mattered how much BETTER it was, nobody would use it. Tim pointed out I was wrong about that, I _agreed_ with him once I thought about it, so I've started it up again.

Rob

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Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 21:16 UTC (Tue) by RiotingPacifist (guest, #68160) [Link] (8 responses)

>They HAVE resulted in more than one company exiting Linux development entirely and switching to non-Linux operating systems for their embedded products, and they're a big part of the reason behind Android's "No GPL in userspace" policy. (Which is Google, not Sony.)

If they were violating the GPL and not giving code back anyway, what difference does it make to either developers of the GPL products in use or end users?

If a company has to do a lot more work in order to avoid using GPL code, then I'm much happier with that than allowing them to leach off a BSD style ecosystem.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 13:59 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (7 responses)

It means Rob gets fewer consulting jobs. I.e. there is a conflict between the interests of those who develop the code, who may get benefits from the widest possible use - the code being free software is effectively cheap marketing; and users who would like the freedom to modify the software distributed to them.

The previous paragraph, the first sentence particularly, is not meant to be judgemental - things just are the way they are. Perhaps Rob chose the wrong licence, and should have used BSD. Perhaps his initial choice of licence was made before contracting revenue was a consideration, and user freedom and/or getting other developers on board was a higher consideration.

Again, no value judgement intended. Licence choice is a personal thing. But our motivations & interests can change over time.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 19:18 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

Rob has never said that is is Ok with people not complying with the GPL (or any other license).

He has said that he sees the 'fix' of lawsuits being worse than the problem it's trying to solve.

In particular, he's annoyed because he was hired by a company to work on Linux, including making sure that there was license compliance, and then the company was sued, in his name, while he was working there.

Frankly, I would be rather annoyed in that situation myself.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 2, 2012 11:14 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

He sees the "fix" of lawsuits as being detrimental to the use of GPL software by corporates. He makes his living from working for such corporates on such software. To my view, what Rob wants is a sort of honour system - where people release their changes to free software if they can, but where there should be no real enforcement consequences for those who don't.

In other words, what Rob really wants is to use the BSD-no-advert-clause licence.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 2, 2012 11:26 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (3 responses)

No, BSD still has requirements to be met.

If what you're saying is true, then what he is wanting is public domain.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 2, 2012 11:32 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

(Particularly, since we're talking about binary-only distribution,
> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
)

Or maybe there's a minimal, only-no-warranty license out there somewhere that requires nothing except to agree to the no warranty thing.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 2, 2012 12:57 UTC (Thu) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (1 responses)

Or maybe there's a minimal, only-no-warranty license out there somewhere that requires nothing except to agree to the no warranty thing.

The Unlicense license (<http://unlicense.org/>), derived from the SQLite license.

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled
binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any
means.

In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors
of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the
software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit
of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and
successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of
relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this
software under copyright law.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 3, 2012 8:22 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Or the MIT License, a personal favorite. It looks basically the same.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 3, 2012 1:34 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you are forgetting that Rob is one of the people who started the busybox lawsuits.

He is not saying that there is never a case for lawsuits, but he is saying that the way the SFC is handling the lawsuits is not something he agrees with, and he has directed them to stop doing so on his behalf.

In other words, he tried doing it their way and didn't like the result. This isn't just armchair quarterbacking from him

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 21:38 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (2 responses)

The point argued in the article is not regarding code contributed to Busybox, of which there may indeed be none as you point out. But there has been a lot of contributed code elsewhere, mainly a lot of hardware support, that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. I fail to see how this isn't a good thing. A vendor who leaves Linux development because of copyleft wouldn't have contributed anyway.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 21:59 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

It's necessary to balance having complying vendors who contribute code against having all possible vendors and a lot of them non-compliant and not contributing anything. This means that you will lose a company like Cisco, who uses you for an excuse to do something they wanted to do anyway. Surely Cisco has enough lawyers and engineers to do compliance correctly if they want to.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:06 UTC (Tue) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link]

If Cisco wants to do something as you say, I suspect they're going to do it whether they have a GPL enforcement action to blame it on or not.

So why muddy the enforcement waters (by selective or lackadaisical enforcement) in order to please them?