Understanding the New Red Hat-IBM-Google-Facebook GPL Enforcement Announcement (perens.com) 96
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. Bruce Perens writes: Red Hat, IBM, Google, and Facebook announced that they would give infringers of their GPL software up to a 30-day hold-off period during which an accused infringer could cure a GPL violation after one was brought to their attention by the copyright holder, and a 60 day "statute of limitations" on an already-cured infringement when the copyright holder has never notified the infringer of the violation. In both cases, there would be no penalty: no damages, no fees, probably no lawsuit; for the infringer who promptly cures their infringement.
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
Perens sees the move as "obviously inspired" by the kernel team's earlier announcement, and believes it's directed against one man who made 50 copyright infringement claims involving the Linux kernel "with intent to collect income rather than simply obtain compliance with the GPL license."
Unfortunately, "as far as I can tell, it's Patrick McHardy's legal right to bring such claims regarding the copyrights which he owns, even if it doesn't fit Community Principles which nobody is actually compelled to follow."
can't we all just get along? (Score:1)
The soft stance taken with GPL violators is an attempt for a peace and love approach to copyleft. This is disappointing when copyleft should really be at war with the copyright tyrants that have repeatedly destroyed lives of so-called pirates with violent para-military raids and freezing of personal assets. The corporate world is playing hard ball, and the open source world wants to string daisy chains.
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Without copyright there is no such thing as the GPL. There is no such thing as copyleft,
Re:can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright is not the only possible legal regime. It's just the one we have now. A legal structure supporting openness could exist side-by-side with proprietary copyright.
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Copyright is not the only possible legal regime. It's just the one we have now. A legal structure supporting openness could exist side-by-side with proprietary copyright.
I'd argue also that we have misapplied copyright to software. The fundamental goals of copyright are not met by offering protection for binary-only software. Just as it's possible to take the ideas expressed in a book and apply them in your own work, it should be possible to read software you purchase and remix the ideas in your own work... but this is impossible (or at least impractical) if you receive only a binary. Binary-only distribution means that you can publish your work while simultaneously keeping
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Okay but right now legal reverse engineering is allowed on the grounds of proven clean-room reimplementation, right? Like say with the ReactOS people being unable to accept patches from former Microsoft employees who worked on Windows. So wouldn't freely-available source muddy those waters?
Wouldn't change it at all. In order to do clean-room reimplementation you have to separate the people who do the reverse engineering from the people who do the reimplementation. You have one group analyze the existing code and create a specification document. The specification contains the ideas from the original code, but none of the original code, nor any mechanical transformation of the original code, so it does not contain any of the original expression (copyright protects expressions, not ideas). Then
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I don't think it's nearly so bad. If software is published in source-code form, reading it is not reverse-engineering. What you have to do is refrain from cutting and pasting. The way we determine if something is a copy or a new work is spelled out in Judge Walker's finding in CAI v. Altai.
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I don't think it's nearly so bad.
That was part of my point :-)
Of course, if you're a startup stepping on the toes of a juggernaut, clean-room might still be advisable. Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison is great, but you have to go to court to do it. Clean-room tends to make the issue so clear-cut that you don't even get to court. Or, if you do, the only avenue of attack open to the plaintiff is to try to prove that you didn't implement the process correctly. Only if they succeed at that do you have to bother with complex AFC arguments.
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What people came up with to encourage the sharing of trade secrets are patents. In exchange for charging people a license fee for a period of time, you show them the better way you figured out how to do something. Current implementation of the patent concept in law also has issues, particularly for software patents.
True. I think the misapplication of copyright to software is much more severe than the misapplication of patents. IMO, the biggest problem with software patents isn't the concept of patenting software designs but the granting of patents for obvious software designs. If the PTO refused to grant for things that are obvious to one skilled in the art, it wouldn't be so bad.
BTW, since you brought up the subject, I'll share my notional "patent system test". You know that your patent system is working correctly
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Re: can't we all just get along? (Score:1)
That's ok but why try to even discourage this guy? If the "profiteering" targets had complied with the license he wouldn't even have a case. Are you blaming the victim here? He contributed code under conditions that it will continue to be free. The targets violated the license, now he wants to be compensated. Now that he has done the homework and identified non compliant commercial distributors of Linux, other copyright holders should file their claims as well. Teach them a lesson. We only care that people
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There is such a thing as copyleft, but, yes, as you mentioned, copyleft is empowered by copyright. The two are not mutually exclusive concepts.
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Re:can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without copyright there is no such thing as the GPL. There is no such thing as copyleft,
Without copyright, there would be no need for copyleft. Somewhat counterintuitively, it's GPL (v2) rather than BSD/MIT that emulates a world without copyright better: we'd have decompilers.
Decompiling is merely an optimization problem: make a front-end that takes x86/etc code (these already exist), output C/etc code, optimizing for human readability; you lose comments and (without debug info) function and variable names. The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet is that cases when using source recovered this way are so niche it's not worth the effort.
For pretty much any interesting program, people would clean up and comment such source, thus there'd be no commercial benefit for keeping the code closed. And, releasing real source means you get better outside contributions, thus cooperating with your users is a win. Ie, we'd have an all-GPL world.
I specified GPLv2, as there exist a way around decompilers: DRM. Of course, doing so on a general-purpose CPU would be mere pointless obfuscation (just run the thing in an emulator and dump memory when decrypted), thus such evil CPU would need to include sealed DRM chips. But, the corp would still have to give the user both the lock and the key: decapping is not that simple, but it can be done, immediately breaking all DRMed code runnable by the chip that got decapped. DRM is physically impossible, it serves merely as a stumbling block. At this point, it'd be so niche that no company would really bother, turning the tables to what we have now with decompilers.
We'd end with a prisoner dilemma world where everyone cooperates, instead of current population of defectors.
Re:can't we all just get along? (Score:4, Informative)
The prisoner's dilemma doesn't result in everyone cooperating. If it did, then it wouldn't be a dilemma.
If the reward for defecting is small enough, and the population punishes defectors enough, it's a smart play to cooperate. If the payoffs are (5,0), (3,3), (0,5), (1,1), you can get 5 once then nothing but 1s for the rest of your life -- while everyone else keeps getting 3s. On the other hand, if you're in a population of defectors, cooperation is suicidal. Note that in a world of cooperation, the average person fares drastically better.
But alas, we live in a world where defectors buy themselves draconian copyright laws, and attempt to make cooperation illegal (like FCC rules [documentcloud.org] or Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive).
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The only reason no one wrote a serious decompiler yet
I'd call Hex-Rays Decompiler for IDA pretty serious. It can do x86/64, PPC and ARM/ARM64; I've only seen output from the x86/64 version and it did a damn good job of making assembler into C. Of course, it also has a pretty serious price tag!
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The point of Open Source isn't really to have source code. That source is a means to an end, but not the end itself. The end goal is to have software that end users can modify to suit their purposes. And even further, the ability to legally share those modifications with other end users.
It is difficult to share modifications with binary patch schemes, and it is difficult to write those modifications. And I say this as a someone who spend a lot of time on 8-bit computers in the 80's where we did this sort of
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Without copyright there is no such thing as the GPL. There is no such thing as copyleft,
Without copyright, there would be no need for copyleft. Somewhat counterintuitively, it's GPL (v2) rather than BSD/MIT that emulates a world without copyright better: we'd have decompilers.
IMO, there's a better solution than a world without copyright: A world that grants copyright protection only when the expression is published. This is trivially the case in all other areas of copyright: You can't publish a book without letting people read the words that it's made of, thus allowing them to learn and therefore remix your ideas in their own expressions. Same for music, same for everything except software. Only in software is it possible to publish your ideas while simultaneously keeping them h
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"....This is disappointing when copyleft should really be at war with ...."
The thing about going to war is that you have to win. If you lose you typically lose in catastrophic, irreversible, grossly injurious ways at best and fatally at worst. If you achieve stalemate you may be so impoverished that you dare not assert your rights in future, and may
find yourself a much more visible and softer target for other adversaries. You have to win, and win unambiguously even if not in every detail. Cheerl
Re:can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Insightful)
If your goal is having as many users as possible, you don't set out to use the GPL. Inherent in that choice you are rejecting some users in favor of gaining a better bargain for everyone else. The Kernel Team still has trouble dealing with this.
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Thank you for making that distinction.
War, even if corporate or legal or ideological rather than national, is a state that encompasses the possibility of being annihilated, and also the opportunity to enforce the same on the opponent.
It's very pleasant to be reminded that some people and organisations seek to create frameworks, laws, habits, methods etc. that anticipate and preempt those mindsets and situations. It's also nice to be reminded that pretty much all the software I use to read and to post here
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David Ben-Gurion:
"We must support the army as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no war. "
That is what one might describe as a nuanced strategy, or deep pragmatism, or farsightedness, or wisdom.
Bear in mind that in the (supposedly) most militant Zionist factions such as Lehi there were people who regarded Hitler and the Nazis as a mere problem but the British as the real enemy. For some of them 6 million murders by the Nazis and 6 years of existential struggle
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It makes more sense if you understand or acknowledge that Israel and the Jews are one of the oldest continuously existing civilizations on the planet. They have been struggling to keep and maintain their national identity and native homeland since the beginning of human civilization.
This isn't about yesterday or 50 years or 100 years or even 500.
They've been at it since our ancestors lived in caves and ate each other.
Plan With The Law In Mind (Score:3)
The corporate world is playing hard ball, and the open source world wants to string daisy chains.
Community can be great but isn't enough to make sure our code is used the way we want. Making a choice about what license we are going to use isn't the end of our copyright decision-making [linkedin.com]. If we want our licenses to be effective, we need to plan for enforcement, for inheritance, and for who will "own" the copyright in our code even if we want our code to be free.
Problem with your communism-capitalism dichotomy (Score:1)
Copyright isn't capitalism.. Copyright is protectionism. We had capitalism in this country before we started protecting book authors from book publishers. Our copyright system started off as a social program to protect weak individuals from powerful people.
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The law is worse than Hitler.
And this is just another example of "We absolutely believe in freedom --- except when we don't"
If you truly believe in Free Society (free meaning "freedom") then you reject the law because it has absolutely nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with forcing specific beliefs on citizens. Actually, if you truly believe in freedom you reject ANY law except one that contains exactly one sentence:
You are free to do whatever you want.
Anything else is hypocritical bullshit.
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Oh really? So I don't have a right to tell you not to commit theft or murder?
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To clarify, my post was intended as sarcasm. Also, my argument wasn't supposed to be about whether or not we should have complete freedom, but only that freedom isn't the same thing as the absence of rules. i.e. We need rules to ensure people respect each other's freedom.
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I understand the sentiment, but without the rule of law you probably get the rule of mobsters. We do not yet live in a science-fictional world where coercion is impossible, regardless of the number of arms borne by one side or the other. This might have to wait for a post-scarcity society, if it is even possi
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I think it is good for people to remember that science fiction isn't only Star Trek, but also Snow Crash.
Surely we could do better than the current copyright regime, and surely we could do worse too.
What worries me about the "advisory" nonsense is that it muddies casual understanding of what the rules are without actually stopping anything or giving real clarity; to the extent a reader thinks it brings clarity, they're most likely just misunderstanding more!
It is perhaps a good policy, but it is unfortunate
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To clarify, my post was intended as sarcasm. I was arguing against the idea that the absence of rules equates to freedom.
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The claim I was responding to, was that if a licence has any rules, then it is not free. My (yes, sarcastic) response is intended to point out the absurdity of equating freedom to the lack of rules.
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Most libertarians still believe they have a right to keep uninvited guests out of their living room. I think the same applies to GPL software. The developers made the rules for their party. If you don't want to play by their rules, you do still have no limit on your freedom: you are entirely free to write your own software and set your own rules for it.
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I think every single libertarian I've talked to believes that they have a natural right to kill an uninvited guest found in their living room!
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Please tell me why I should be unable to defend myself in my own home.
And don't tell me "call the police". Not a single crime I've been a victim of that I reported had been acted upon, even though in two of three times catching the perpetrator would be trivial (unprovoked battery: the bum kept sitting there, cell phone robbery: robbers did not turn the phone off). That's why I don't even bother to report crimes anymore. On the other hand, try to cross the street at a crosswalk with a broken (always red)
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Like most libertarians, you were unable even to tell if I had expressed an opinion or policy proposal, or if I was simply stating a fact.
The answer to your question is, hey dillweed, I didn't say if you should be able to or not, argue with yourself in the mirror not in "reply".
Oh, and if your State's laws tell you to just stand there and die at a broken traffic light, you're really from an exceptional backwater. In my State, a malfunctioning traffic signal is legally equivalent to a stop sign in every direc
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Oh, and if your State's laws tell you to just stand there and die at a broken traffic light, you're really from an exceptional backwater. In my State, a malfunctioning traffic signal is legally equivalent to a stop sign in every direction; which actually means not only that the pedestrian doesn't need to wait for a light, it actually means they can cross at any time and cars are required to yield!
I live in no State, thank you. But, pray tell, how exactly a car is supposed to know that green light doesn't mean green?
The problem in Poland is, you get a fine for crossing on red not only when there's not a single car in sight, but even if the road is completely closed. You are allowed to cross a road at your own risk only if there's no pedestrian crossing within 100 meters. Who cares if the red light is stuck, and there was no traffic at the time? There's money to be obtained, catching criminals on
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The car will know because cars here always have to yield to pedestrians anyways.
I know in a lot of the world people would just get run over in that case, but I live in a more civilized place.
In any case, this story is about US copyright law. Your opinion is out of place.
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Please tell me why I should be unable to defend myself in my own home.
Please tell me why you need to defend yourself with lethal force against an uninvited guest in your living room?
I mean, civilised people would offer them a cup of tea, sit down and have a chat about why they're there and whether they're ok.
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I mean, civilised people would offer them a cup of tea, sit down and have a chat about why they're there and whether they're ok.
Against a civilised person, no potentially lethal force is required. Such a person wouldn't also break into my home.
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You're making a very large number of assumptions there, many of which could easily be wrong should you encounter an uninvited guest.
However, it's very clear: If I ever find myself in your house uninvited, I must kill you with immediate effect as an urgent matter of self-defence.
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Then, depending on jurisdiction, you'd be guilty of murder or at least manslaughter. Homicide during home invasion is no small thing. While this will be no consolation for me (I'd be dead), homicides are a kind of crime that the police tends to actually investigate. In Poland where I live, this is 8 to life if it appeared you were in my home accidentally or with no intention to confront me, 25 to life if it counted as (even unarmed) robbery -- facts don't seem to matter as in practice our courts decide t
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Under normal circumstances, no. There are highly unusual circumstances that could cause a civilized nonviolent person to break in. Until the intruder demonstrates hostile intent, or you know why the intruder came in, shooting the intruder would be murder.
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Wow, you must live in a fucked up country that you were the victim of a crime.
More than once.
And: police is not working.
Did you pay your taxes?
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Not everyone lives in a city.
My house is on a back country road that is a back way between 2 small towns, one of which has a bar and the other doesn't. Every 9 or so months, someone misses the curve and ends up in my fence. I call 911, if an ambulance is needed it is 10-40 minutes. Police (state highway patrol) take an hour to show up and give me a report for insurance/etc. For criminal activity, county sheriffs respond. I've only had to call them once (found a gun in the road at the end of my drive) a
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Even Hitler is not worse than Hitler.
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Even Hitler is not worse than Hitler.
Mao, Stalin, Muhammad?
Re:GPL violators (Score:4, Insightful)
They may or may not have been worse than Hitler, but Hitler is not worse than Hitler.
To be less flippant:
Of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Muhammad it seems that Hitler is the only one who sought to murder millions of people as a matter of policy, on principle as it were. The others murdered millions of people, evidently many more millions in the cases of Stalin and Mao, incidentally. The moral import of this escapes me. To be in fear is to be in fear. To be murdered is to be murdered. The scale of the crimes defies my ability to assess or differentiate.
Time to begin a move to GPLv3? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
Q: Is it true that the principles the four companies announced today are taken from the GPL 3 license, but they are applying them to GPL 2?
A: Yes. If your software is under GPL 3, the same waiting periods that the four companies have promised are required. Thus, it is ironic that when originally presented with the opportunity to apply the GPL 3 to Linux, Linus Torvalds and the Kernel team were quite hostile about it, while the kernel team’s recent announcement attributes the principles they have adopted to the text in GPL 3. Perhaps they’ve learned something since those hostile moments.
Re:Time to begin a move to GPLv3? (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair to the Kernel Team, the major thing they objected to in GPL3 back then was the anti-TiVo-ization terms. These would prevent lock-down of the software such that the end user would be blocked from updating it. I am told that a number of products gained a "developer mode" just to comply with GPL3. This is something we should encourage, IMO. But perhaps the Kernel Team are still more oriented to having companies use Linux than keeping it as Free as I would like.
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To be doubly fair to the kernel team, it's borderline impossible to relicense linux even if they want to. When someone contributes code, they do *not* transfer ownership of the code's copyright to the kernel team, they simply make available their code under the GPLv2 and then the kernel team pulls the changes. The kernel doesn't include an "or later" clause in its license, and neither do most contributions, so the kernel team can't legally relicense the kernel without first obtaining approval from every con
Re:Time to begin a move to GPLv3? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not really impossible, and even the Kernel team has studied the problem with a lawyer and acknowledged this. It's not easy either. Remember, Wikipedia did a some time ago. You have to publish the decision for opposition, and then anyone who opposes it who has code in the kernel has the right to ask for that code to be removed before the change.
Re:Time to begin a move to GPLv3? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here's the thing - GPLv3 would basicall
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I don't know who told you this, but it's just not true. A lot of businesses prefer GPL3 to GPL2 because many of its terms are more well written and more fair than GPL2.
Businesses that want to do a TiVo-like lock-down might not like GPL3. That might be some manufacturers or embedded devices. But consider how many WiFi access points allow installation of OpenWRT, etc.
Google is said to have forbidden the Affero versions of the GPL since they effect software-as-a-service. Is that what you're thinking of?
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GPL2 has patent terms as well. And in general, if you grant Open Source software using a license with no patent terms, there is an implicit estoppel under equitable law. The issue is that you can't give somebody something that infringes your own patent, authorize them to use it, and then sue them for infringement.
Say you used the BSD license. No patent terms, right? Estoppel anyway? Yes!!!
So, most sensible attorneys are happier with having that in writing than implicit.
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The author understands it was mainly the anti-TiVo-ization terms. But you know Linus. Rather than say "we could use GPL3 and grant an exception to the anti-TiVo-ization terms if we really wanted to", Linus gets obscene, calls, names, personally abuses people, the whole "Linus Show" which is a lot less cute now than that he is a grown man rather than a young guy challenging a whole industry.
Bad cop (Score:2)
I don't see the problem with this. Either way, the deliberately offending party gets held accountable. In fact it would be entirely appropriate for these companies to fund lawsuits like this a la the Gawker case because their interests overlap heavily.
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As far as I can tell so far (not having read the actual cases) it's McHardy's legal right. However, the Kernel Team is bothered that it might turn users away from Linux and don't condone his asking people for money. Nor do any community norms I've seen in 20 years approve of his behavior.
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The problem is that in many jurisdictions non-enforcement of copyright violations makes the license unenforceable. I'm not sure what the statutes of limitations are here (and I also think they are very flexible), but I would say much of the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel code could probably be considered "public domain" in many areas by now.
If there is a "community agreement" not to sue infringers of the GPL licence in connection with the kernel, then I'd say that is evidence that the license is void and any compliance
Re:Bad cop (Score:4, Insightful)
Creating a Laches (which is what you are talking about) isn't really the same as placing something in the public domain. Laches means you waited for economic demand for the infringing product to develop before you brought the lawsuit, presumably to enrich your income. It doesn't apply to the next new infringer to come along.
Also, be careful not to confuse it with trademarks going into the public domain.
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Copyright doesn't go away if you don't enforce it. Trademarks do.
I know of no community agreement to not sue violators. TFS describes one to go soft at first, giving violators a solid chance to come into conformance. If they don't, the kid gloves are off and lawsuits are reasonable.
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There are plenty of examples where copyright wasn't enforced because the copyright holder waited too long to enforce it, usually until a deep-pocketed entity comes along. Pretty much any claim in civil courts is subject to it including trademarks and patents.
The OP stated that the community frowns upon suing someone for copyright because it might turn big companies away from using Linux. There is no 'agreement' as in a written contract but Linus himself has quite publicly stated he doesn't care much about w
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It is as simple as this: People against him using his legit enforcement powers want to muddy the moral waters to make him look bad, and even though this harms everybody involved, they're happy to drive users away with confusion as long as they can phrase it as if they have the moral high ground and are fighting the good fight.
They may not have considered the moral implications of their combination of licensing and code-sharing terms, but I sure did, and for clarity: When I release code under a Free Software
Re:VMWare (Score:4, Informative)
No. Last I heard (and many people are not aware of this) the VMWare case was under appeal in Germany. Meaning that VMWare could still lose. However, VMWare has been given cure periods far in excess of the ones mentioned here.
Original Article (Score:5, Informative)