Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com) [LWN.net]

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 29, 2017 16:03 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com) by rsidd
Parent article: 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!"

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Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 29, 2017 16:25 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (5 responses)

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.

Actually, it will be (and is, in a huge number of cases) a victory because the drivers (or whatever code it is) have finally been upstreamed and new users of those products have proper support. In other words, Linux runs on a couple of billion devices now, which it wouldn't have if Linus et al had the FSF's ideological purity. But it wasn't by lying back and accepting proprietary drivers as you seem to portray it. It's an ongoing and successful process to get manufacturers to open up their drivers.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 29, 2017 17:41 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, it is only a victory if the day arrives and if the code remains maintained. Meanwhile, licence-violating products get sold, no remedies are ever offered, and the perpetrators act as if they're doing everyone a favour if they agree to cooperate and do eventually manage to get some source code out there.

And, by the way, lots of code ends up on billions of devices, much of it probably governed by more restrictive licensing policies and policed by much more severe enforcement regimes than the relatively benign practices of the FSF, Conservancy and other reputable organisations.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 30, 2017 0:56 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

Bottom line: FSF had limited desktop/server penetration with the GNU tools but never even got a working kernel (largely because of closed-door development practices in early years, despite the free-software licence). BSDs got on to devices thanks to Apple, but saw very limited contribution in return -- the almost unusable "Darwin" code dump, which too ceased to get updates. (On the other hand, Apple maintains LLVM and keeps it free, so there's that. Also CUPS and some other stuff.) The Linux way, of having a copyleft licence and enforcement by persuasion rather than by lawyer, is what has made a real impact on the world. The reason Google and many others use the Linux kernel is the hardware support, and the reason for the hardware support is doing things the GregKH way not the SFLC way. But if the FSF types still haven't realised this, a quarter century after Linux was first released, they never will.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 30, 2017 3:57 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the "truth" lies somewhere in the middle. You need to be tolerant and nice and educate, with those who ultimately are persuadable, but you need also to be willing to apply the stick to those who are just taking the piss (who often will do their best to /appear/ to seem reasonable).

OpenWRT exists because of the stick.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 30, 2017 11:44 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

I've personally dealt with folks who take a "bugger off" attitude, most notably Senao/Engenius.

Their products are built on OpenWRT, but they *refuse* to release their kernel sources for at least some of their products. They do however occasionally release "GPL sources" tarballs of everything but the kernel -- Albeit after some cajoling.

They are an example of a company that has absolutely no excuse for continuing to violate the GPL, and IMO utterly deserve the stick to be waved at them.

It's funny. The Senao products I have contain the proprietary Atheros wifi driver. Back when I was still in that line of work, Atheros required some truly onerous licensing requirements to ensure their driver (and the developers working on it) in no way co-mingled with other source code, and had per-unit royalties which required proper production accounting, and massive penalties if any term of the (long) agreement was violated.

Yet somehow the requirement to release their complete corresponding source code to the kernel is too much of a burden for a publicly-traded company who posted a US$3.4M profit (on revenues of about $57M) during Q1 2017?

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 30, 2017 12:14 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

The Linux way, of having a copyleft licence and enforcement by persuasion rather than by lawyer, is what has made a real impact on the world.

When you take away the legal standing of a licence, all that remains for "persuasion" in the face of a party violating that licence is to indicate that they will suffer unspecified consequences to their reputation or to their economic activities, but these will be empty threats in many cases. You could, of course, not use a licence at all or use a permissive licence instead and see if this "persuasion" is still a successful tactic.

I suspect that the "persuasion" only works precisely because the licence brings legal obligations and consequences that, indeed, involve lawyers in the case of the most stubborn violators. But, of course, various people are happy to portray responsible compliance efforts in a bad way, while letting licence compliance slide because it either doesn't affect them or they may even benefit in that it sends more paid work their way.

Maybe those people might acknowledge their role in creating the environment for the situation described in the article instead of whining about lawyers, while getting lawyers to write guides about how not to be taken down in the German legal system, and instead of being generally offensive.