Ethical issue

"Apply the free-rider dynamics to your GPL software and you'll feel
differently. Those folks who break the license and put it in their
proprietary products without distributing any source are OK, because they
are a relatively small percentage of the whole. Right?"

Decide which argument you want to use. Should we subject ourselves to
advertising (with grim resignation, I suppose, if not with glee) out of
moral obligation, or out of fear for consequences?

You keep tacking back and forth between ethics and DRM Doomsday. I
suppose you want to make both arguments, but as far as I can tell you keep
flipping to the threat model when the premises of your ethical analysis
are challenged.

But, all right, I'll take up your challenge.

1) People should honor the terms of the GPL. I say this out of personal
selfishness because my career is largely grounded on its success, and out
of solidarity with my community, which is similarly dependent in many ways
on that same success.

2) Ethically, it's fuzzier. Why?

2a) We have to remember that the GPL is a copyleft, a deliberate and
calculated reaction to a monopolistic scheme called copyright which *is*
the status quo in Western society. A person who believes that the current
scope and power of copyright is substantially congruent with our social
contract would view the GPL as corrosive to that contract, and perhaps
itself unethical. You've probably seen more instances of that argument
than I have.

2b) I have personally violated the GPL without guilt, and, as it turned
out, with the sanction of RMS. Many years ago I copied a GPLed ELF
executable onto a floppy disk for a friend (or perhaps co-worker) who'd
unfortunately nuked some critical program like dpkg off of his system and
needed to restore it. I proffered no written offer of source code nor
made an oral offer of same. The sources were not also on the floppy.
(Had I been asked, I would have made a joke about it, and complied, but
still, I did not meet the requirements of the license.) Years later I
brought this case up on in debian-legal in the course of an argument with
RMS and he, as I recall, characterized such phenomena as unworthy of
notice. In legal terms, he regarded it as "de minimis" infringement, and
_ethically_ he was totally cool with it because that's exactly the sort of
helping-your-neighbor that would have taken place at the MIT AI Lab back
in the good old days (and perhaps still today). Yes, my intentions were
honorable and not at all like your example. But I will not robotically
attach moral opprobrium to a GPL violation for precisely this reason.
In your scenario, would my knee-jerk reaction be one of condemnation?
Almost certainly. But if asked for a sober, moral assessment, I will have
to actually, you know, find out the facts of the particular case first.
_Ethically_, I can do no less.

2c) Thanks for bringing up proportionality. Where is the FSF equivalent
of your DRM-Doomsday scenario? What misery are we GPL copyright holders
going to inflict on all of mankind (or, for greater congruity with your
example, all users of proprietary software) if we determine that there is
too much infringement of copyrights in GPL-licensed works? No one has
threatened any doomsday. (For that matter, I haven't heard the
advertising industry threaten one either--is your prediction an informed
one?) It has taken the FSF 25 years to bring one lawsuit, and while I am
not privy in any way to the negotiations being undertaken, I am pretty
confident that the main thing the FSF is after is compliance--not money
damages. To the best of my knowledge and belief (based solely on my
personal impressions of FSF principals and their writings), the FSF is not
motivated to excuse continued non-compliance in exchange for cash.

GPL licensors, with rare exceptions, seem to be fairly sane and rational
people. Your DRM Doomsday scenario posits that the web advertising
industry consists of people who are, at best, indifferent to web
accessibility not just for the blind, but for a lot of others besides, and
at worst are malicious madmen.

Well, okay. You and Arthur Miller may be right about that.