A successful defense against a copyright troll

Posted Apr 24, 2018 5:48 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: A successful defense against a copyright troll by pturmel
Parent article: A successful defense against a copyright troll

Missing is any information about how Geniatech was distributing the kernel, why that didn’t comply with the GPL, and what the company then did to fulfil its obligations.

A successful defense against a copyright troll

Posted Apr 24, 2018 11:54 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

That was outlined before. No details, but you can guess: chinese supplier which does not care about GPL compliance at all sends goods, German company sued... only this time German company was daughter company of that same supplier... which meant it was just matter of asking mother company to publish source for kernel.

9 times out of 10 (if not 99 times out of 100) chinese companies don't comply with Linux GPL license not because they maliciously want to hide something, but because they just don't care to comply. It's cheaper for them that way: do nothing in the beginning, dig out sources when caught. Since many products would never be sold wide enough to catch attention of GPL enforcers... that saves them money!

A successful defense against a copyright troll

Posted Apr 24, 2018 12:46 UTC (Tue) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link]

In my experience it is mostly lack of understanding that something needs to be done.

What we did on the engineering part in this case was actually a bit more than just publishing the source. We made sure that the source code could be rebuilt and that the built kernel matched the one in the firmware. We also provided decent build instructions.

A successful defense against a copyright troll

Posted Apr 24, 2018 12:59 UTC (Tue) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]

That was outlined before.

Almost everything in the article has been reported before, in considerable detail (see e.g. Harald Welte's blog post linked to in the article).

The main contribution of this presentation (and its reproduction here) seems to be the one-sided concern for the plight of commercial-scale copyleft violators. I find it telling that it was James Bottomley who (according to the coverage) introduced concerns about actually enforcing the GPL (as, IIRC, he has in the past been vocal in advocating in favor of minimal (if indeed any at all) GPL enforcement).