Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/10/27/gpl-feedback.html

[ This blog
was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege
of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit
in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk (for which the video is
available below) at the OpenWrt Summit. I also had the opportunity to host
the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the
Linux developer community about Conservancy’s
GPL Compliance Project for
Linux Developers.

ELC EU has no “BoF Board” where you can post informal
sessions. So, we scheduled the session by word of mouth over a lunch hour.
We nevertheless got an good turnout (given that our session’s main
competition was eating food 🙂 of about 15 people.

Most notably and excitingly, Harald Welte, well-known Netfilter developer
and leader of gpl-violations.org,
was able to attend. Harald talked about his work with
gpl-violations.org enforcing his own copyrights in Linux, and
explained why this was important work for users of the violating devices.
He also pointed out that some of the companies that were sued during his
most active period of gpl-violations.org are now regular upstream
contributors.

Two people who work in the for-profit license compliance industry attended
as well. Some of the discussion focused on usual debates that charities
involved in compliance commonly have with the for-profit compliance
industry. Specifically, one of them asked how much compliance is
enough, by percentage? I responded to his question on two axes.
First, I addressed the axis of how many enforcement matters does the GPL
Compliance Program for Linux Developers do, by percentage of products
violating the GPL? There are, at any given time, hundreds of
documented GPL violating products, and our coalition works on only a tiny
percentage of those per year. It’s a sad fact that only that tiny
percentage of the products that violate Linux are actually pursued to
compliance.

On the other axis, I discussed the percentage on a per-product basis.
From that point of view, the question is really: Is there a ‘close
enough to compliance’ that we can as a community accept and forget
about the remainder? From my point of view, we frequently compromise
anyway, since the GPL doesn’t require someone to prepare code properly for
upstream contribution. Thus, we all often accept compliance once someone
completes the bare minimum of obligations literally written in the GPL, but
give us a source release that cannot easily be converted to an upstream
contribution. So, from that point of view, we’re often accepting a
less-than-optimal outcome. The GPL by itself does not inspire upstreaming;
the other collaboration techniques that are enabled in our community
because of the GPL work to finish that job, and adherence to
the Principles assures
that process can work. Having many people who work with companies in
different ways assures that as a larger community, we try all the different
strategies to encourage participation, and inspire today’s violators to
become tomorrow upstream contributors — as Harald mention has already
often happened.

That same axis does include on rare but important compliance problem: when
a violator is particularly savvy, and refuses to release very specific
parts of their Linux code
(as VMware did),
even though the license requires it. In those cases, we certainly cannot
and should not accept anything less than required compliance — lest
companies begin holding back all the most interesting parts of the code
that GPL requires them to produce. If that happened, the GPL would cease
to function correctly for Linux.

After that part of the discussion, we turned to considerations of
corporate contributors, and how they responded to enforcement. Wolfram
Sang, one of the developers in Conservancy’s coalition, spoke up on this
point. He expressed that the focus on for-profit company contributions,
and the achievements of those companies, seemed unduly prioritized by some
in the community. As an independent contractor and individual developer,
Wolfram believes that contributions from people like him are essential to a
diverse developer base, that their opinions should be taken into account,
and their achievements respected.

I found Wolfram’s points particularly salient. My view is that Free
Software development, including for Linux, succeeds because both powerful
and wealthy entities and individuals contribute and collaborate
together on equal footing. While companies have typically only enforce the
GPL on their own copyrights for business reasons (e.g., there is at least
one example of a major Linux-contributing company using GPL enforcement
merely as a counter-punch in a patent lawsuit), individual developers who
join Conservancy’s coalition follow community principles and enforce to
defend the rights of their users.

At the end of the session, I asked two developers who hadn’t spoken during
the session, and who aren’t members of Conservancy’s coalition, their
opinion on how enforcement was historically carried out by
gpl-violations.org, and how it is currently carried out by Conservancy’s
GPL Compliance Program for Linux Developers. Both responded with a simple
response (paraphrased): it seems like a good thing to do; keep doing
it!

I finished up the session by inviting everyone to
the join
the principles-discuss list, where public discussion about GPL
enforcement under the Principles has already begun. I also invited
everyone to attend my talk, that took place an hour later at the OpenWrt
Summit, which was co-located with ELC EU.

In that talk, I spoke about a specific example of community success in GPL
enforcement. As explained on the
OpenWrt history page,
OpenWrt was initially made possible thanks to GPL enforcement done by
BusyBox and Linux contributors in a coalition together. (Those who want to
hear more about the connection between GPL enforcement and OpenWrt can view
my talk.)

Since there weren’t opportunities to promote impromptu sessions on-site,
this event was a low-key (but still quite nice) start to Conservancy’s
planned year-long effort seeking feedback about GPL compliance and
enforcement. Our next
session is
an official BoF session at Linux Plumbers Conference, scheduled for
next Thursday 3 November at 18:00. It will be led by my colleagues Karen
Sandler and Brett Smith.