Response from Conservancy on this article

Posted Dec 10, 2015 16:12 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Response from Conservancy on this article by ncm
Parent article: A referendum on GPL enforcement

Your last paragraph is worth repeating...

We are failing not only the people who spend the money to comply, we are failing everyone who would like their employer to behave ethically, and who would like to work for ethical employers. We are failing all the people who would like to purchase products from ethical suppliers. And, of course, we are failing all the people who would like to alter the software in the products they are able [to] buy.

It's like the story of the modern age: "doing the right thing will cost us something, so let's not bother". And once people stop bothering, nobody does the right thing any more, and the right thing becomes socially unfashionable or even objectionable.

I think the term "referendum" is inappropriate, really, although it was maybe coined in haste. What we have here is a survey of people who care enough about copyleft licence compliance that they will give their own money to make sure that random corporations (who are making tidy sums) will comply with Free Software licences applying to code that many of those contributors did not write. In other words, it is not just those people who can afford to defend their own direct interests, but also those who wish to defend their indirect interests (because they may also have written code that is copyleft-licensed), and in some cases those who wish to defend the interests of a cause they merely care about.

It is hard not to feel exploited, not by the Conservancy who is doing a fine job of making sure that licences are being upheld (and who is also being exploited here by showing such generosity in the face of such brazen wrongdoing), but by corporate interests who are no longer merely getting stuff for free: they are effectively being paid while they misuse other people's work.

It would be good if once in a while, those profiting from this industrial-scale copyright infringement were served with injunctions halting sales and distribution of the illicit products concerned. Then, everyone involved (and their apologists) might appreciate how nice and forgiving the Conservancy folk seem to be.