Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 19:35 UTC (Tue) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by BrucePerens
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

I know who you are Bruce. I was the one at Lineo who approved paying Erik to work on Busybox, way back when. I know the Busybox history.

Help your clients perform due diligence, rather than helping them avoid enforcement.

I want to help people avoid infractions, not avoid enforcement. I think this is pretty moral.

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 19:54 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Tim,

Avoid "infractions"? I guess you mean avoid unintentional infringement. Yes, they're all unintentional. But when I get to work with these companies I find that they are building multi-billion-dollar product lines and have no compliance program, little concept of due diligence, and no working connection between engineering and legal. They get their engineering from small software or chip companies who don't communicate their due diligence requirement and don't stay around to provide source code.

Or, in the case of Best Buy's Insignia line, they buy a run from a factory and don't ever have a relationship with the engineering department.

They are infringing on their proprietary technology providers as well, including ones that provide content protection technology and have really harsh penalties in their contracts and the ability to shut the vendor out of producing a broad swath of products that carry that content. They get caught by those guys as well as SFC.

The only moral, ethical solution is to help them with due diligence.

What you are now attempting to arrive at is a situation like Android, in which the entire user-mode is under a gift license but you still have the Linux kernel. So, SFC will have to work harder to find kernel developers. And then you'll scrap Linux for BSD, and SFC will end up enforcing attribution requirements in BSD, using the precedent from the appeal in Jacobsen v. Katzer.

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:30 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

If you'd just told Erik "no, spend the extra week to start over from scratch"...

Hindsight, eh?