coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Sep 09, 2012 at 10:05:04PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote at 23:52 (EDT) on Saturday:
> > some developers don't want to enforce, some do, and many don't care
> > either way.  saying "the kernel developers are actively working to
> > undermine enforcement" is overly broad and simply wrong.
> 
> I agree with Mike.  I'll go further, even -- I actually don't know of
> *any* individual developer in the Free Software community who is
> "actively working to undermine enforcement".  Some developers have told
> me they don't like it and "would prefer that Conservancy not do it", and
> have even asked me to stop.  Indeed, some ask me to stop every time they
> see me.  But none go as far as to "undermine" it.  Frankly, if anything,

My view is that if an author don't want copyleft to be enforced, they
should choose a permissive license. Writing software that's nominally
under GPL but that's treated by the copyright holders as permissive
when big companies start infringing is worse than either GPL or
permissive; in this case, the effective result of being GPL is that
only parties with sufficient money/power can use the code as if it
were permissive-licensed, while everybody else is forced to treat it
as GPL.

In particular, other free software projects distributing under
permissive licenses cannot incorporate the code into their own free
works, while powerful companies happily incorporate it into their
proprietary works. This is injustice.

> Meanwhile, I think it's really important that we don't bifurcate the
> community over this issue.  Permissive licenses have their place, and
> folks who want to write code and license it that way should.  It's still
> Free Software.  And, while I've often argued that an unenforced
> GPL is effectively the same as a permissive license, it's certainly not
> *worse* than a permissive license.

I think it is worse, much worse, for the reasons I've described above.
Unenforced GPL is basically like giving a permissive license to big
companies while sticking free software developers with the red tape of
the GPL.

Rich