Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/02/11/harald-on-enforcement.html
I’d like to thank Harald Welte for
his reasoned
and clear blog post about GPL enforcement which I hope helps to
clear up some of the confusions
that I
also wrote about recently.
Harald and I appear to agree that all enforcement actions should
request, encourage, and pressure companies toward full FLOSS
compliance. Our only disagreement, therefore, is on a minor strategy
point. Specifically, Harald believes that the “reinstatement of
rights lever” shouldn’t be used to require compliance on all FLOSS
licenses when resolving a violation matter, and I believe such use of
that lever is acceptable in some cases. In other words, Harald and I
have only a minor disagreement on how aggressively a specific legal
tools should be utilized. (I’d also note that given Harald’s
interpretation of German law, he never had the opportunity to even
consider using that tool, whereas it’s always been a default tool in the
USA.) Anyway, other than this minor side point, Harald and I appear to
otherwise be in full in agreement on everything else regarding GPL
enforcement.
Specifically, one key place where Harald and I are in total agreement
is: copyright holders who enforce should approve all enforcement
strategies. In every GPL enforcement action that I’ve done in my life,
I’ve always made sure of that. Indeed, even while I’m a very minor
copyright holder in BusyBox
(just a
few patches), I still nevertheless defer to
Erik Andersen
(who holds a plurality of the BusyBox copyrights)
and Denys
Vlasenko (who is the current BusyBox maintainer) about enforcement
strategy for BusyBox.
I hope that Harald’s post helps to end this silly recent debate about
GPL enforcement. I think the overflowing comment pages can be
summarized quite succinctly: some people don’t like copyleft and don’t
want it enforced. Others disagree, and want to enforce. I’ve
written before that
if
you support copyleft, the only logically consistent position is to also
support enforcement. The real disagreement here, thus, is one about
whether or not people like copyleft: that’s an age-old debate that we
just had again.
However, the anti-copyleft side used a more sophisticated political
strategy this time. Specifically, copyleft opponents are attempting to
scapegoat minor strategy disagreements among those who do GPL
enforcement. I’m grateful to Harald for cutting through that ruse.
Those of us that support copyleft may have minor disagreements about
enforcement strategy, but we all support GPL enforcement and want to see
it continue. Copyleft opponents will of course use political
maneuvering to portray such minor disagreements as serious policy
questions. Copyleft opponents just want to distract the debate away
from the only policy question that matters: Is copyleft a good force
I say yes, and thus I’m going to
in the world for software freedom?
keep enforcing it, until there are no developers left who want to
enforce it.
