Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

And I agree the name-calling was excessive but that's what Linus does.

So you think it is acceptable for people in positions of power and responsibility to be abusive because "that's what they do"?

Forget his mail then, consider GregKH's mail which is quoted in full there. Do you actually disagree with any of it?

I have already written what I thought about the argument that people shouldn't uphold Free Software licences, referencing this previous discussion in particular.

But although the quoted text may accurately describe how certain companies respond to the threat (or possibility) of legal action, it seems to advocate that licences should have no legal power because some people think it might upset their corporate friends. I cannot agree with that position at all. The text, particularly as originally quoted, also serves to cultivate a false equivalence between eager litigation and "principled" enforcement, the latter employing litigation as the tool of very last resort.

The author seems to think that those contributing code should allow well-resourced organisations to deliver products that ignore the needs of the users and the contributors' demands that the users be empowered. That contributors and users should all wait for some far-off day when various people in the right "scene" have oiled the right cogs, greased the right palms, or whatever, so that the machine will start spitting out half-relevant source code for the newer products of whichever company it is that cannot follow the licensing terms (and yet have such a formidable legal department).

Apparently, should that day arrive, this will somehow be a victory even though the original infringing products will have long since been rendered obsolete and consigned to the waste pile, forcing their owners to buy new, shiny, and also probably infringing stuff. But some people will have had some lucrative fun along the way, so I guess it will all have been worth it for them. The users, meanwhile? "Let them eat cake!"

Linus and his inner circle should learn more about it before they talk about law. They tend to further fog up the issue rather than make anything clearer.

In general, companies that have been enforced against recognize that they have had a lapse of due diligence and do not become enemies. There are, however, a few exceptions where the companies "start out arrogant" and dig in. Cisco was one, and VMWare is being one now. VMWare has literally spent 4 or 5 Millions to fight something they could have gotten out of for at most a quarter Million counting any necessary re-engineering for compliance, and only tens of thousands to the plaintiff.

Having people know that rules are rules and must be followed is more important than losing a few companies who simply refuse to play well with others.

Imagine what would happen to us if we infringed their copyrights. Enforcement upon them under SFC guidelines is a lot kinder and gentler than the way they operate.