Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 20:30 UTC (Wed) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by raven667
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

What do you think is actually going to happen if some random product your company makes were to be found in violation of copyright?

In the case of a busybox violation, I don't know. The information I have seems to indicate that the SFC will want to audit all of my products, going on a fishing expedition for GPL violations. I'm willing to expend resources to avoid finding out if that's the case.

And about your Mayor Metaphor, you can plainly see from the SFCs tax documents that they are not asking for million dollar fines.

That's not what they ask for, but if you total up all the tangible and intangible costs (product delays), that's what a big company hears. That's a simple ballpark placeholder for engaging in any litigation at this level.

that spending a thousand dollars on compliance efforts as in your example

I should have clarified that the $1000 dollars is not spent on compliance - that's already being covered by our compliance policies. That money in the metaphor refers to the amount we'd spend on re-implementing busybox with a BSD license. It's not insurance in the traditional sense. It's more like a payment to someone else, to make the person requesting a million dollars go away permanently. And no, I don't think we can reimplement busybox for $1000. But 10 companies could implement something usable for $10,000 a-piece.

I think this really comes down to the fact that you trust the SFC to behave reasonably, and I don't.

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Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 1, 2012 20:50 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I think this really comes down to the fact that you trust the SFC to behave reasonably, and I don't.

Yes, I think that is part of our disagreement, also I have the (maybe unfounded) belief that they really don't have the ability to enforce unreasonable actions. If they tried to veto software in bad faith for example then I would ignore their request and punt it to the courts to sort out. It seems likely that the SFC would lose badly if they tried anything in bad faith such as ignoring evidence of license compliance. I don't really have any reason to believe they would try something in bad faith though as it would be all cost and no upside for them.

I guess I don't think there is a need to "trust" the SFC to not turn into a copyright troll and the courts have been showing very little patience with copyright trolls recently.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 3, 2012 12:13 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] (1 responses)

"What do you think is actually going to happen if some random product your company makes were to be found in violation of copyright?"
"In the case of a busybox violation, I don't know. The information I have seems to indicate that the SFC will want to audit all of my products, going on a fishing expedition for GPL violations. I'm willing to expend resources to avoid finding out if that's the case."

I'd be very interested in how you came about this "information", and just what lengths you've been going to already to avoid finding out whether it's accurate.

Have you avoided attending any of Bradley Kuhn's presentations in the last year, and reading his description of the things that SFC actually does request?

"I think this really comes down to the fact that you trust the SFC to behave reasonably, and I don't.

I do. But I also have the option to withdraw their authority to act on my behalf, if they violate that trust. If all the unfounded hyperbole about the SFC's behaviour did turn out true, I would do so.

As it is, though, this hand-wringing just seems like a crude manipulating tactic to discourage copyright holders in other projects from joining with SFC, so that the cynical approach of silencing busybox developers actually does achieve the overall goal of letting GPL violations go completely unpunished.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 3, 2012 19:05 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I also have the option to withdraw their authority to act on my behalf, if they violate that trust.

I think something that could make understanding this difference of opinion clearer is that they _did_ withdraw support form SFC for enforcing their copyrights on Busybox but SFC has other authors who continue to consent to SFC enforcement and so were unable to stop the enforcements after they lost trust.