About the calculus for the project
About the calculus for the project
Posted Feb 2, 2012 15:09 UTC (Thu) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)In reply to: About the calculus for the project by tbird20d
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox
"Some people have said that what the SFC requests in remedies is not that costly, but I can assure you that large corporations see it very differently. Matthew, in particular, keeps asserting that the real reason for this project is "to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license." This is simply not true."You both characterise the motivation with dramatically different words. But if we analyse it carefully, you seem to be saying the same thing. I'll try for a more neutral rendition:
The motivation is to reduce the risk and the adverse consequences of a violation — whether it be an intentional or inadvertent violation.
Personally, I don't care care about the distinction between deliberate and accidental violation, which seems to be the major difference between your version and Matthew's statement. If you have taken steps to reduce the consequences of an "accidental" violation, that can only mean that you want to reduce the amount of effort you expend in ensuring that you comply with the licence in the first place. Which makes it, to me, a deliberate choice.
It's a shame that Busybox has been left with the responsibility of bringing errant manufacturers into compliance, and I'm glad that they asked for the manufacturers to comply with the licences of all the software they ship, rather than only asking for the source for Busybox. That doesn't seem like an excessively costly and inappropriate condition, to me.
If one of my children calls the police because I'm beating them, I think it's quite right for the police officer to refuse to leave me alone until I stop beating all of my children; even the ones who didn't make a formal complaint.
I think it's high time that Linux kernel developers joined in and granted SFC or other organisations the authority to act on our behalf too. Then we won't need to rely on the fact that Busybox is usually also pirated; we can act directly when there is a violation on the kernel itself.Harald has done good work in the past, but as noted elsewhere he's extremely busy with other things now. And if Busybox is no longer going to be able to help to keep manufacturers honest, we do actually need someone like the SFC to be acting directly on our behalf.
I'll be assigning the rights to the SFC to enforce all copyrights that I personally hold in the Linux kernel and any other project they ask me about. I strongly encourage all other kernel developers to do the same.