coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 10:47:54PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 08/26/2012 09:09 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> > IMO, Tito's response is quite correct.  However, I'd add that various
> > maintainers (and former maintainers) of projects have supported
> > enforcement: Denys has agreed to continue enforcement on BusyBox, and
> > Erik agrees -- and in fact, is very supportive -- as a former
> > maintainer.  Rob, as a former maintainer, used to agree and now
> > disagrees, and I respect his opinion and Conservancy doesn't enforce on
> > his behalf anymore.
> 
> Heh. Interesting interpretation.
> 
> When I started the first enforcement action to deal with the backlog of
> reports Erik Andersen left me in the form of the Hall of Shame, my
> interest was in getting access to code. But a year of enforcement
> efforts (and several code drops) didn't result in a single line of code
> from any third party added to the busybox repository. I withdrew my

This statement true as [very cleverly] stated, but misleading. The
interesting code, which HAS BEEN obtained, is not enhancements to
busybox. It's system-level code, mostly kernel code.

The legal rights to kernel code of course belong to the kernel
developers, who are actively working to undermine enforcement. That's
not in question here; as frustrating as it is, this is their legal
right.

The moral rights to the code, on the other hand, belong to every
member of the public who, if the GPL were being properly enforced on
the kernel, would have the right to obtain and use this code to enable
them to use previously-unsupported hardware with Linux. From a
standpoint of defending these moral rights, my understanding is that
the Busybox enforcement efforts have been a success.

Rich