The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 3, 2017 11:36 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: The rise of copyright trolls by ewen
Parent article: The rise of copyright trolls

> there is a legitimate question about what is "good faith" attempts at GPL compliance these days.

Be that as it may, the problem isn't companies that attempt to comply and perhaps don't do it well -- it's the organizations who can't be bothered to even try -- No acknowledgment of GPL software, no source code or offer, and (if you can manage to contact them) a "screw you" attitude about the whole thing.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 3, 2017 21:33 UTC (Wed) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link]

If you read beyond the first sentence of my previous comment you'll see that I agree with you -- the biggest problem with GPL compliance at present is those that don't even try (followed by few people doing GPL compliance "enforcement" work, so one person doing "enforcement" apparently "for profit" stands out).

IMHO a centralised "source escrow in the open" service like the http://gplcompliance.org/VENDOR/PRODUCT I suggested would make it obvious pretty quickly who was trying. Eg, a pre-purchase check of http://gplcompliance.org/VENDOR/ would indicate whether was generally trying to comply with the GPL, or just releasing products without paying attention to the licenses. (For vendors that already have a good open source story, the whole of http://gplcompliance.org/VENDOR/ could just redirect to their existing "${VENDOR} Open Source" page, needing only a one time set up of the redirect. Which would make those existing pages easier to find too.)

Ewen