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Comment by neuland | Hacker News Reader

> The GPL is the legal embodiment of this Golden Rule: in exchange for benefiting from my hard work, you just have to extend me the same courtesy.

This is a great article that's focused on just explaining why GPL is good. But I'm wondering what people think about enforcing this part of the GPL.

I was very disheartened to see the Linux community's and other GPL projects' attitude to enforcement actions brought by individuals.

If you ask people to contribute under the terms of the GPL, I think that it is fair for those contributions to be enforced. And unless a project has some kind of CLA that excludes it, the individual contributor should be able to hold violators to the copyleft portions of the license.

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> I was very disheartened to see the Linux community's and other GPL projects' attitude to enforcement actions brought by individuals.

Can you share some examples of what's happened that's disheartening? I'm assuming based on context that the reaction to individuals enforcing GPL violations have been negative, which I would agree is disheartening. If you don't enforce the terms, the terms are valueless, and you might as well just use a more permissive license.

The big case recently was in Germany against VMWare [0]. They lost that case. But it was controversial partly because the person (who contributed a non-trivial amount of networking code) was asking for monetary damages in addition to bringing the company into compliance.

But setting the money aside, even the enforcement part was flamed by Torvalds and Greg KH [1]. The gist was that they're able to bring more people into compliance by working with companies behind the scenes. And lawsuits shut down all that backroom handholding. So ultimately, the lawsuits result in less compliance and less Linux adoption.

Linus mentions BusyBox specifically, where attempting to bring companies into compliance just led to fewer users and a shitty closed source alternative that these companies started using instead.

From Linus' perspective that's lose-lose: fewer users and more closed source software. But from people interested in GPL enforcement, they are more interested in not having their contributions abused by companies for profit. So if they won't give up their bad attitude, that's not the GPL projects' problem.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/635290/

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

That's not really being against enforcement. It's having a tactical argument that sueing is not the best way to get enforcement. Given that they did lose the lawsuit, a big part of the Linus/GregKH argument seems vindicated.

Only if you want to maximize use of open source software in general and/or that specific open source project.

If you're goal is to minimize the number of people using your work without following the agreed terms, it is worth it to shoo away non-compliant companies or companies that don't share the values of open source.

Like another poster said, why use GPL if you don't actually care that companies are violating the terms.

>Only if you want to maximize use of open source software in general and/or that specific open source project.

>Like another poster said, why use GPL if you don't actually care that companies are violating the terms.

Both of these are wrong according to Linux/GregKH. They both very deeply care about both those things and argue very convincingly that you get more of both of them by their strategy than with lawsuits. They cite very specific cases of that both in the kernel and in BusyBox, and the fact that the lawsuit was lost is further support of their argument.

I don't think you understand. From the perspective of a pro-lawsuit person, there can only be upside. If they lose the lawsuit, it's the same effectively as the status quo. The company will continue abusing your contribution. But if you win, you win. Similarly, if you scare off people that are not interested in open source values (ie. they're using open source only b/c people have convinced them that in practice it's better b/c they can offload maintenance of their code to the project), that's basically fine too.

That's only true if your only options are a lawsuit or sitting on your hands. Linus and Greg explain how they do a bunch of other stuff that ends up actually working. So that's a false dichotomy.

And it's not even true that there's no downside to losing. You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license. Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's.

> You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license.

Which means the license is unenforcible and a new legally enforceable license is needed.

> Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's

Nope, they would have been screwed already, they just didn’t know it yet. And fewer future people would end up screwed as new licenses would be created in the aftermath.

Untested enforceability is not better than tested and confirmed un-enforceability.

Or to use an absurd example in an even more absurd context, it’s better to open the box and know your cat is dead than to leave the box closed and believe it might still be alive.

(EDIT: I was wrong)

>Untested enforceability is not better than tested and confirmed un-enforceability.

This is addressed by Linus directly and it's simply not true. That the license can be enforced without testing in court is evidenced by the fact that they are being able to enforce it without lawsuits. If you get a legal precedent that somehow says the opposite you are now deeply screwed. Courts are fickle beasts. You now get to spend a bunch of time/money trying to reverse that, or even worse, launch the worlds largest open-source relicensing effort. For the kernel that's basically impossible. You'd basically destroy copyleft completely.

You're right, I hadn't considered the potential ramifications for the Linux kernel specifically, and how variably educated court judges can actually be.

This almost smacks of the discussion yesterday in the thread about gorillas that were dismantling poacher traps. There was a subthread about intelligent parrots stealing bait from traps that were set to capture artificially introduced predators of the parrots. Thus the parrots were unknowingly harming themselves, though benefiting themselves in the short term.

What's the closed source BusyBox alternative?

I believe you are mixing up two separate Linux related lawsuits: the case against VMWare by Christoph Hellwig, who is known for his filesystem contributions, was supported by SFC and the goal was compliance with the license.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit...

Some years earlier, there were lawsuits brought by Patrick McHardy, who contributed a non-trivial amount of networking code, that asked for monetary damages; these lawsuits were not supported by any organization.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick-mchardy-g...

I'm not involved in those communities. Do they generally dislike when people go after individuals legally for violating the license?

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