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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

Clearly RMS believes in having software licenses with teeth, which is why he so strongly advocates the GPL over the BSD and MIT licenses. When he disagreed with Apple's stance on IP litigation, he didn't just exhort them to be excellent — he boycotted them for several years. So it's not that RMS is strongly opposed to coercive enforcement; he just doesn't value people as highly as he does code.

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There are no punitive 'teeth' in GNU licences. If you don't like the terms, don't use the thing under that license.

Stallman is his own man and can boycott what he likes and explain why to others.

"Punitive" "teeth" as found in proprietary EULAs and various unreasonable copyright laws looks like jailtime and financial ruin.

The same copyright law can be used to enforce the terms of the GPL.

And if you don't like a code of conduct, you can equally just stop participating in a community. Unlike rejecting a license, you can even reject a code of conduct and continue to use the software produced by that community.

Nope...

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-gu...

That's the basis of eg Kernel enforcement, the most-distributed project out there by far.

This describes, as far as I can tell, the de facto enforcement practices of ONE GPL copyright holder. I don't see where it places any binding limits on even the enforcement the SFLC would take, and of course it has no power to enforce any limits whatsoever on other GPL copyright holders.

In the particular case of Kernel development, contributors are NOT required to assign their copyrights to any shared institution, are perfectly within their rights to take any enforcement action against violators that they wish, and sometimes do exercise that right: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-beats-internal-legal-thr...

I think the spirit of RMS' argument is to benifit the people in general. In first the intent is to get the software to be accessible to as many people as possiblez and now his intends to make sure that talented people don't shy away from contibuting to open source projects just because of rigid policies. In my opinion he's been quite reasonable in both cases, whether you and I agree with his proposed method.

The only "talented" people who benefit from lax harassment policies are people whose primary "talent" is harassment.

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