Re: As long as the GPL has no enforcement teeth

Do you have personal experience in the matter in the US? I'm not interested in arguing this, as I've experienced it first hand vs reading online about situations mainly taken to court in Germany. Most of the cases are in Germany because it's easy to simply stop the violations there. However, there's little room for pressing for significant damages in Germany (other than obtaining attorney fees). Likewise in the US it's the stated goal of the SFLC to simply achieve compliance with the GPL.

What this tells companies is that there's no real risk to not obeying the GPL. Further, we're not empowering the community to formally register their copyrights to be able to file suit and win attorney fees and damages for infringement. There aren't any big cases on the law books in the US that I'm aware of that would give any company serious pause before willfully violating the GPL vs just ignoring it until they get caught and counting anything after that as a trivial cost of business.

We need cases on the books showing exactly what is required of a "written offer" so companies can't simply list a copy of a single version of the GPL license and act as if they're acting in good faith to a US judge. We need more cases showing the termination clause of the GPLv2 in action.

This is what I refer to as lacking teeth -- many companies are profiting enormously off of GPL software and aren't holding up their end of the bargain. We shouldn't be resorting to essentially begging companies to honor the license of the software they're exploiting for profit. There needs to be real damages and real consequences. I hope one day for a new organization that will fight the cases as they should be fought, with the added benefit of funding exploited developers from the proceeds of suing the greedy corporations exploiting them.

-Brad