Companies are made of humans

There's a nuance here that I feel people often miss. While companies are legally sort of atomic entities, in reality they consist of humans. In this case, it seems to me that there is genuine confusion on part of the developer who's been talking for them, and of course the original intent and views of others may again be very different.

I've seen some larger companies from inside, and I'd say it's almost always a mistake to attribute any coherent intent or agency on them (like "Google is evil"). At best they have a... tangent, a direction where they seem to be heading. Look at the big companies we know best. They cannot even prevent themselves from firing people doing good work and killing profitable products in a way that seems random at best.

Here I gather we have a smaller company. In this case, while it's deplorable that people look at Nvidia and assume doing the same is fine, I think that *is* an understandable mistake, and it should be forgivable if you are willing to be corrected and not keep doing Nvidia.

In this case, I think it may even have been the case that the GPLv3 licensing was done BOTH 1) to control upstreaming and 2) in the mistaken belief that it is legally and culturally/ethically acceptable—as ridiculous as that may sound to us who are too deep in these things.

Now I'm no fan of companies circumventing open source licenses—and never imagined defending one!—but I think we should stop pretending that anyone doing this is likely aware they are doing so (albeit I'd assume many transition from "not aware" to "too invested to change"). Mastering programming, open source culture and law is a high bar.

I do also find it a bit sad that we seem to normalize the (American?) culture where it is assumed that if you are a company and doing anything at all, lawyers, and other similarly unproductive layers of bureaucracy, should be involved, as was suggested on lkml. That's an unnecessarily high bar for open source involvement. I don't want open source collaboration to have a lawyer as a requirement. Realistically also probably in most countries it isn't. In this case, I think the company needs to talk to one if it wants to keep doing what it has been doing, but if it has understood there is a problem and is working to fix it, I'm just not sure hiring a lawyer is in any way fruitful.

It's probably also healthy to recognize that it's a big ask from a single developer that they not revert a patch that changes "GPL v3" back to GPL if that breaks things. I know, in beautiful theory (and if you have billion dollar judgments), you never do anything until you have figured out the licenses. In practice, a programmer just does not get to be the guy who merged the patch that broke the product and didn't revert, and probably this is also the route of least risk for companies in most countries where justice is focused on righting wrongs, not making examples and enriching lawyers. Although he should have tested the patch that changed it to GPL v3...

NOW, I would still consider this still quite separate from what the kernel community should do about this. I feel it's quite reasonable to apply some pressure, such as in the form of that patch. But I think the assumption of hostile intent should be reevaluated at times.