Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/10/may-they-make-me-superfluous.html

The Linux
Foundation announced
today
their own
FLOSS license compliance program, which included the launch of a
few software
tools under a modified BSD license. They also have offered
some training
courses for those that want to learn how to comply.

If this Linux Foundation (LF) program is successful, I may get
something I’ve wished for since the first enforcement I ever worked on
back in late 1998: I’d like to never do GPL enforcement again. I admit
I talk a lot about GPL enforcement. It’s indeed been a major center of
my work for twelve years, but I can’t say I’ve ever
really liked doing it.

By contrast, I have been hoping for years that someone would eventually
come along and “put me out of the enforcement business”.
Someday, I dream of opening up the <[email protected]> folder and
having no new violation reports (BTW, those dreams usually become
real-life nightmares, as I typically get two new violations reports each
week). I also wish for the day that I don’t have a backlogged queue of
200 or more GPL violations where no source nor offer for source has been
provided. I hate that it takes so much time to resolve violations
because of the sheer magnitude that exist.

I got into GPL enforcement so heavily, frankly, because so few others
were doing it. To this day, there are basically three groups even
bothering to enforce GPL on behalf of the
community: Conservancy (with
enforcement efforts led by
me), FSF (with
enforcement efforts led
by Brett Smith),
and gpl-violations.org (with
enforcement efforts led
by Harald Welte).
Generally, GPL enforcement has been a relatively lonely world for a long
time, mainly because it’s boring, tedious and patience-trying work that
only the most dedicated (masochistic?) want to spend their time
doing.

There are a dozen of very important software-freedom-advancing
activities that I’d rather spend my time doing. But as long as people
don’t respect the freedom of software users and ignore the important
protections of copyleft, I have to continue doing GPL enforcement. Any
effort like LF’s is very welcome, provided that it reduces the number of
violations.

Of course, LF (as GPL educators) and Brett, Harald, and I (as GPL
enforcers) will share the biggest obstacle: getting communication going
with the actual violators. Fact is, people who know the LF exists or have
heard of the GPL are likely to already be in compliance. When I find a
new violation, it’s nearly always someone who doesn’t even know what’s
going on, and often doesn’t even realize what their engineering team put
into their firmware. If LF can reach these companies before they end up as
a violation report emailed to me, I’ll be as glad as can be. But it’s a
tall order.

I do have a few minor criticisms of LF’s program. First, I believe
the directory
of FLOSS Compliance Officers should be made publicly available. I
think FLOSS Compliance Officers at companies should make themselves
publicly known in the software freedom community so they can be
contacted directly. As LF currently has it set up, you have
to make a request of the LF to put you in touch with a company’s
compliance officer.

Second, I admit I’d have liked to have been actively engaged in LF’s
process of forming this program. But, I presume that they wanted as
much distance as possible from the world’s most prolific GPL enforcer,
and I can understand that. (I suppose there’s a good cop/bad cop
metaphor you could make here, but I don’t like to think of myself as the
GPL police.) I did offer to help LF on this back in April when they
announced it at the Linux Collaboration Summit, but they haven’t been in
touch. Nevertheless, I’ll hopefully meet with LF folks on Thursday at
LinuxCon about their program. Also, I was invited a few months ago by
Martin Michlmayr to join one subset of the project, the
SPDX
working group and I’ve been giving it time whenever I can.

But, as I said, those are only minor complaints. The program as a
whole looks like it might do some good. I hope companies take advantage
of it, and more importantly, I hope LF can reach out to the companies
who don’t know their name yet but have BusyBox/Linux embedded in their
products.

Please, LF, help free me from the grind of GPL enforcement work. I
remain committed to enforcing GPL until there are no violations left,
but if LF can actually bring about an end to GPL violations sooner
rather than later, I’ll be much obliged. In a year, if I have an empty
queue of GPL violations, I’ll call LF’s program a unmitigated
success and gladly move on to other urgent work to advance software
freedom.