What should they have done? [LWN.net]

What should they have done?

Posted Sep 28, 2007 22:50 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: What should they have done? by apollock
Parent article: GPL enforcement: waiting for the Monsoon

When I haven't been forced into court, all I personally care about is
identifying the exact version of each GPL package and either confirming
there were no changes to that base version, or else obtaining said patches
(and preferably the .config file when there is one) under the same license
terms as the rest of the project. I usually just want to reproduce what
people did with the code I wrote. (Unlike RMS, I'm way too lazy to try to
force anybody to mirror something that's already publicly available, at
least not without a darn good reason.)

Claiming busybox users were violating the EULA for investigating this is
not a move designed to make the developers _less_ interested. That move
works explicitly _against_ what I want:

Q: So your device contains vanilla 1.1.1 plus these two patches from the
mailing list, so we already have all this code and can reproduce what
you've done?
A: We're not saying and trying to find out violates the EULA!
Q: OK, lawyers come out now...

If you _really_ want to escalate, you follow that sort of thing up by
ignoring the lawyers who try to contact you outside of court to talk about
it. That's really not a recipe for staying out of court.

And once lawyers enter into it, the letter of the license becomes more
important than just the spirit, and of course there's legal fees to
recover, and it just escalates. (The current settlement is entirely in
the hands of the lawyers.)

But when it's just developers, before the lawyers get involved? Show me
the code. If you're shipping vanilla BusyBox 1.00 with no patches, then
_SAY_ that. Explicitly. Either "It's $VERSION and we did not modify it"
or "It's $VERSION and here's a patch that applies against $VERSION". If
you want to be a legal stickler, give a URL to where we can download that
source from busybox.net, and offer to email a copy of that source as a
file attachment upon request.

Probably what confuses some companies is "it's publicly available version
$X, we got it from $URL, and we did not modify it" seems too obvious to
say, but _we_ don't know whether or not they modified it unless they tell
us. So they never actually explicitly say it, but then when we ask about
it they get confused...

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What should they have done?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 8:01 UTC (Sun) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

I'd like to 2nd (or is that now 3rd?) the advisement to say nothing about the case unless your attorney authorizes it. As much as I'd love to read every detail of the exchanges and have a day by day update of the situation, I would hate to see things unravel (as in get side-tracked and delayed) because the BusyBox developers generated some code in public that they are not familiar with. Lawyers use (almost) the same language as the rest of us, except it's code where they work.

See SCO Uses the "Core" Word - Asks for Stay to be Enforced in Arbitration for an example of this. It ain't about a core dump. Such an innocent word, but it is sure to have some lawyers up in arms. Did Rob break any syntax rules or create any infinite loops above? I don't know the code.

Mr. Landley should ignore all of us who are gnawing on every news article about the complaint. There will be theories, speculation and just plain WAG running the spectrum from dead-on to bizarre fantasy. Leave us to suffer in our ignorance. Leave it to your lawyers to display any output from their coding.

What should they have done?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 20:35 UTC (Sun) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

I'm aware of this, and have been taking it into consideration. The
biggest line I've been drawing is "I won't talk about anything that's
happened since the suit was filed", and I do stop and think when talking
about stuff from before the filing. I've _mostly_ been quiet on the
subject.

That said, the question asked wasn't really specific to this lawsuit.
It's "what do I actually need to do to comply with the spirit of the
GPL", and that's an important question. Staying silent on how other
companies can _avoid_ such suits in future strikes me as both
disingenuous and counterproductive. I'm not trying to lure anybody else
into getting sued; quite the opposite. I'd rather _not_ have to be
involved in future lawsuits if there's an easy way to avoid it.

Yes, I pondered staying silent about this topic to make the lawyers
comfortable, but if I would have said exactly this if I wasn't a party to
the suit (and in fact I might have already and it could already be dug
out of the busybox mailing list archives by the opposing side), why _not_
say it now? The point of the suit isn't to change the way _I_ work. Nor
is it to make GPL compliance harder in the cases where it's easy _not_ to
get sued when you take the right steps before lawyers get involved.

I'm also not the only party to the suit, so saying what would have
satisfied me once upon a time when thresholds were lower doesn't
guarantee it would have satisifed Erik, and or that it would be
sufficient now lawyers are deployed. (I thought I made that clear.)

I should probably just write a brief "complying with GPLv2" HOWTO and
post it somewhere. Most of the tricksy edge cases only kick in when
you're trying to weasel out of it, not when you just want to discharge
your obligations and are new enough at it you may not be entirely certain
what they actually are...