Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 19:03 UTC (Tue) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by rahvin
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

I think you misunderstand what I said. This is not to allow companies to violate the GPL, it is to help them (and mostly their suppliers, really) use non-GPL software. That way, if the supplier makes a mistake and can't find the exact source for the non-GPL software, nobody is on the hook for litigation and extreme remedies.

In practice, it would make things easier if my suppliers didn't ship any GPL user-space code to me. At Sony, we'll put on our own user-space GPL code. We have good practices in place for managing our GPL responsibilities in this case, thank you very much. In the case of kernel code, to my knowledge we've never had a problem with a supplier providing correct sources for this.

I understand why this is sub-optimal in the grand scheme of things, because it detracts from the community value of GPL user-space code.

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:38 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (3 responses)

The easiest way to avoid violating the GPL is not to use it. People here are screaming because that's not the behavior they WANT, but wanting water to flow uphill doesn't make it happen.

Did you guys not NOTICE?

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/233753/gpl-c...

Google's "No GPL in userspace" thing is very much _not_ an isolated incident. Those of us who were big GPLv2 advocates and don't like GPLv3, what did you EXPECT us to do when you tried to shove v3 down our throats?

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:58 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

These numbers, in themselves, don't prove anything about a change in attitudes towards the GPL. The *absolute* number of GPL projects is increasing. The relative number is certainly decreasing, but how much of that is because people who previously liked the GPL no longer do and how much of it is because more people are coming to free software development from a web background with less tradition of strong copyleft licenses?

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:18 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (1 responses)

According to netcraft the absolute number of IIS web servers has been increasing steadily too, ever since the 1990's.

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:47 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Yes, and that's equally meaningless as an individual statistic. Extracting meaning takes knowledge of population changes.