Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 7:46 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by zyga
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

> In proprietary world if company A licenses something from company B then
> company A does nothing wrong and all the fault for what company B did
> falls on company B.

That's why Apple is suing Google for the features it does not like in Android, and Microsoft is shaking up kernel devs for FAT patents.

Oh, wait. They're not doing that. They're going after the manufacturers of the final end-user products.

So how do things work differently in the proprietary world again?

to post comments

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 8:33 UTC (Wed) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (2 responses)

They are not going after those companies because of license issues. They fight for patent extortion money. That's different and does not change my case. I still think there is an advantage of building a product out of proprietary bits because then the vector for being sued is very small. In copyleft world you need to go the extra mile to comply (accurate source, object files for static linking -- anyone seen that around?) and you are wide open for patent trolls that can go after you because their lawyers found a for loop patent in the code that is a part of your product.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 11:03 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Because the entities that do not want to care about free software licenses worry about the patent vs licence distinction?

They don't. It's all of a big 'IP rights' soup for them (the latest Oracle vs Google complaint is a good example; we make the distinction because we want to be clean and tidy, proprietary houses stuff all in the same bag).

For the practical use case presented here (assemble bits sourced elsewhere in an hardware appliance, without checking legalities) there is *no* distinction between patents (for hardware components) and free software licenses (for software). They behave the same way. If you put unclean parts in your products you can be sued directly.

The purposefully inept corporation

Posted Feb 1, 2012 11:17 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

The "advantage of building a product out of proprietary bits" is that you can put magic binaries on a device where the few people who are likely to be disassembling them are unlikely to be doing so in order to determine copyright infringement, and even if that were their motivation, the result would be to pass the buck to the proprietary vendor if any infringement were claimed. In short, it allows sloppy management of software licences under the blanket of existing business relationships.

I agree with all those people who find astonishment in the apparent inability of large corporations to properly account for the origins of their code, especially given those complicated supply chains those companies have for everything else. But then large corporations also seem to only have a pretty vague idea of where their raw materials come from, especially when those materials come from places where the extraction or production of such materials is damaging to the environment and harmful to the people involved in the actual extraction or production.

I guess it's a case of "could try harder but won't".