Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 21:38 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by landley
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

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.

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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?