RE: tlug: RMS and Amazon...

[Adrian Havill <havill@example.com>]

On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> The FSF has most of the necessary assignments.  It would be
> interesting to see what would happen with Linux eg.
> 
>     FB> This may lead to underenforcement.  I don't know of any
>     FB> instances in which the GPL has been litigated.  I wrote to
>     FB> Stallman for information about a year or so ago, and he said
>     FB> that a warning had always been enough to get compliance.
>     FB> Maybe ...
> 
> I don't see any reason to doubt RMS's statement, in the U.S.  The NeXT
> case is pretty persuasive.

Had a chance to talk to FSF's Timothy Ney the other week, who said that
most people give up their copyright to the FSF do so for the purpose of
letting the FSF make sure the GPL isn't violated.

He too confirmed that of all the cases he's dealt with, they all have been
the result of misunderstandings, rather than intentional violations-- gave
a specific example of a proprietary software (wouldn't name the
product) using some of GNU's "tar" code-- once they were warned, the code
was changed/rewritten/removed.

He did confirm that it's difficult to get lawyers to volunteer their
services to the FSF for enforcement, as it often results in conflict of
interest (a firm specializing in software law wanted to do gratis work for
FSF until it found out that many of the people it would end up
possibly persuing were its own clients).

I posed the theoretical question that what if an evil company had so much
money it decided to intentionally violate the GPL on a grand scale, on the
theory that it could overwhelm the resources of the FSF in legal fees even
though it  may lose the cases in the end-- "the Chinese army" tactic. Ney
said that if such an event ever occurred, he was confident that the
community would rally to support it. Hmmmm.
--
Adrian HAVILL, Senior Software Engineer
Development Team Leader, TurboLinux Japan
PGP Key Fingerprint: D5B6 321C 0F82 117D EAC2 6D08 D942 FA38 7427 8195

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