Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/08/20/compliance-advice.html

For ten years, I’ve been building up a bunch of standard advice on GPL
compliance. Usually, I’ve found myself repeating this advice on the
phone, again and again, to another new GPL violator who screwed it all
up, just like the last one did. In the hopes that we will not have to
keep giving this advice one-at-a-time to each violator, my colleagues and
I have finally gotten an opportunity to write out in
detail our
best advice on the subject.

Somewhere around 2004 or so, I thought that all of the GPL enforcement
was going to get easier. After Peter Brown, Eben Moglen, David Turner and I had
formalized FSF’s GPL Compliance Lab, and Dan Ravicher and I had taught a
few CLE classes to lawyers in the field, we believed that the world was
getting a clue about GPL compliance. Many people did, of course, and we
constantly welcome new groups of well-educated people in the commercial space
who comply with the GPL correctly and who interact positively with our
community.

However, the interest in FLOSS keeps growing, rapidly. So, for every
new citizen who does the research ahead of time and learns the rules,
there are dozens who don’t. The education effort is therefore forever
ongoing because the newbies always seem to outnumber the old hands. It’s our own copyleft version of Eternal September. The
whole space is now big enough that one-by-one education in our
traditional way can no longer scale.

Hopefully,
publishing some guidelines for GPL compliance will help the education effort
scale. If you redistribute GPL’d software commercially in any way, or you
are a lawyer who represents people that do, please spend the time to
familiarize yourself with this information. If you have ideas on how we
can expand this document, we would of course love
to hear from you.

Update (on 2008-08-26): Thanks for all the feedback we’ve gotten from the community. We’ve been glad to update the document to incorporate your suggestions.