Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Feb 3, 2012 12:13 UTC (Fri) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by tbird20d
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."

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.

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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.