coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Felipe Contreras]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:

> Frankly, I presume you'd do better to turn you attention to Red Hat, who
> is now publicly doing GPL enforcement as well, against TwinPeaks, on a
> program for which they don't hold 100% copyright (mount in linux-utils).
> Red Hat is asking in court for the same things that Conservancy asks for
> in its enforcement, but Red Hat is much more wealthy and powerful than
> Conservancy, so the danger they do something that bothers you is much
> greater.

I'm only interested in Linux enforcement.

> I remind you that Conservancy has never caused the "nightmare scenarios"
> that you keep proposing, thus an argument that Conservancy might
> do it are just as likely if you s/Conservancy/Red Hat/g.

That's nice, but that wouldn't calm any lawyer. It would be good to
see an online statement from Conservancy explicitly saying this: there
would not be enforcement by proxy.

>> If this 1% wants to be protected, that's their choice, but I wouldn't
>> say "Linux wants enforcement"; that is an exaggeration, in fact it's
>> only a very small fraction of it.
>
> I have met at most 5 Linux copyright holders who actively oppose
> enforcement; I've met hundreds who say to me privately "thank you for
> doing what you're doing" and dozens who have signed up Conservancy's GPL
> Compliance Program for Linux Developers.  I noted already elsewhere in
> the thread the fact that Linus told me personally that he wants each
> Linux copyright holder to make his/her own decisions about enforcement.
> It's Linus' policy, and he leads the project, and decides whose patches
> make it into the canonical version that companies use.  Take up your
> issue with him if you aren't happy that some people chose to enforce the
> license.

I have never suggested that the policy should be changed, I merely
pointed to the policy, and it's precisely what I said; each copyright
holder decides, so it would be unfair to say that Linux as a project
is seeking enforcement, when it's fact it's only selected individuals.
It would be nice to see the list of individuals, and how much code is
actually covered, but if you say there are dozens who have signed,
that means there are thousands who haven't.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras