
12 Years of GPL Compliance: A Historical Perspective - Danieru
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/LinuxTag-2011/compliance.html
======
pron
I have great sympathy and admiration for GNU GPL and the FSF. It's so unusual
and refreshing to see clear politics in an industry that tries to shy away
from it.

This is an interesting piece about how Tim O'Reilly tried, and succeeded, to
de-politicize free software, and make it "business friendly":
[http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler](http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler)

The OSI's own account gives O'Reilly a far smaller role than the Baffler
piece:

* [http://opensource.org/history](http://opensource.org/history)

* [http://opensource.org/faq#free-software](http://opensource.org/faq#free-software)

* [http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensou...](http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensource.org/history.html)

~~~
bowlofpetunias
The industry doesn't shy away from politics.

It just pretends that it's opinions and practices aren't political, despite
their enormous and very deliberate impact on the way society functions and
public policy is made.

The industry's politics are mostly disguised by claiming it's the objective
truth, or "that's just the way things work". You can see examples of it here
on HN in pretty much every thread that isn't 100% technical.

And even then, like Mitch Kapor said "Architecture is policy". The fact that
we don't feel comfortable acknowledging it in a society that has become anti-
political doesn't mean it isn't about politics.

Hell, attempts to de-politicize such things are in themselves expressions of
political ideology.

~~~
pron
You are absolutely right.

------
iuguy
A couple of years back I started breaking MiFi hotspots and found an alarming
number of violators. I spoke to Bandluxe who make a lot of Mifi tools and
managed to get them to comply on one platform. My favourite is Novatel who no
longer respond to me calling them out on their MiFiOS kit based on Linux.

Edit: A talk I did about Bandluxe's PR39 at BlackHat Europe 2012 is here for
those interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZAjtxmxTkg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZAjtxmxTkg)

------
bkuhn
Weird that my slides from almost three years ago got posted just a few days
ago. :) I am glad some enjoyed them.

My answer to most of the naysaying here would be simply to say that GPL is the
Constitution of a Free Software community who chose to refuse any
proprietarization of their work. If you believe in the principles of a
Constitution, then it's worth upholding that Constitution.

And, I don't do this full-time. GPL enforcement has never been my full-time
work, but has been the minority plurality of my work since 1999. And I get
paid less than every software developer I know, BTW, and my salaries since
2001 are all publicly known. :)

------
Nursie
Is that the on-screen display from a talk? Because I really don't like it as
an actual web page.

\--edit-- thanks to both replies below. Wasn't meant as a criticism, I was
just expecting an article rather than slides.

~~~
chalst
That's generated using Pandoc targetting S5/slides.js. You can get all the
slide content as one plain HTML page by navigating to the bottom right hand
corner and clicking on the large "Ø" that appears.

I guess there will be a Beamer version of the talk as well.

------
jes5199
Okay, uh, enforcing GPL in this way doesn't particularly seem worthwhile to
me.

If the end result of GPL is 1) a few companies completely refuse to distribute
GPLed software (Apple, for example) and 2) the rest of the companies use GPLed
code without following the rules but with no consequence 3) huge amounts of
money and effort are thrown against these forces, with only symbolic levels of
success in changing company behavior

... why are we even bothering?

That Don Quixote slide seems especially appropriate.

~~~
justinpombrio
Which other way would you suggest?

Also, I was under the impression that very little money and effort was put
into attempting to enforce the GPL through lawsuits (and these slides don't
seem to suggest otherwise, naming just a few people and suites over the
years). Is it more common than I think?

~~~
jes5199
No, you're right, I didn't get any actual sense of the scale of the endeavor.
Maybe this guy just loves doing it full time.

But to answer your question: this whole thing makes me want to reconsider
licensing my software as GPL. Just do MIT and not have to think about it.

~~~
gillianseed
Well you don't 'have to think about it' even if you licence your code as GPL
(or any other licence). It's not as if someone forces you to chase after
violators.

~~~
jes5199
I guess you're right. That article a few days ago has me fretting about GPL 2
vs GPL 3 and the incompatibility between them. I mean, I'd like my code to be
used in whatever projects need it, and I'd like to be able to accept code back
from them. But it seems like it would be really easy to accept code that
accidentally constrains you to a particular license.

~~~
belorn
If you want compatibility between the two GPL licenses, the easiest way to do
so is to license the software under GPLv2 or any later version. Alternatively,
one can add an exception for GPLv2 while licensing the code under GPLv3.

