Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

Posted Apr 11, 2016 22:00 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation? by landley
Parent article: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

> I experimentally determined that pursuing legal action on the "Hall of Shame" I inherited from Erik Andersen did not result in a single line of code added to the busybox repository, but once I'd PROVED it was a waste of time I couldn't put the genie back in the bottle when I tried to shut it down again

Code doesn't have to be merged back into an upstream repository to be useful. Enforcement actions (or the threat thereof) have resulted in code being made available to millions of users on a wide range of devices, with the two most obvious being the WRT family of router firmware and many, many third-party Android images that have extended the useful lifetime of devices. That's an amazingly long way from being a waste of time, and only the tip of the iceberg - there's a vast number of smaller projects which exist only because people are working with companies to obtain source code that should have been released in the first place.

Corporate decision making

Posted Apr 11, 2016 22:53 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

No company ever makes the best possible decision. People have to make the best possible decision in the available time.

For almost all software (other than revenue-generating proprietary, which is more and more a special case), it's in the company's interest to go Free.

But internal advocates for going Free have to make a case for it. In my experience copyleft can help there.

If the decision is set up as "comply with the license, at a small cost" vs. "violate the license and take some risk" it's easier for that internal advocate to get the company to do the right thing than if the advocate has to argue for doing the extra work of a Free release, for questionable future benefits.

(When I was in the position of the internal advocate, I got the company to comply, but it was easier to do a source release of all the non-copylefted stuff at the same time, so it all went out. But would not have been possible without copyleft helping to frame the decision.)