Re: Possible GPL Violation of Linux in Amstrad's E3 Videophone

Theodore Ts'o
2004-10-02T02:03:13Z

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 03:53:49PM -0600, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> Try enforcing it in court when they get a dozen of their engineers to
> lie and state they reviewed the code on one terminal and
> converted it by writing new code on another. There's no moral anything
> with some of these big companies and their employees
> will say whatever they have to. I've been there, in the real world, all
> GPL means is you are giving away your IP to whomever is running
> whatever effort and you have little recourse. The GPL is tough to
> enforce the way its worded for individuals. There's too much
> wiggle room for people to use. Alan Cox in a previous email basically
> stated, " they are being nice and answering emails." Doesn't look
> like it takes much for these people to smooch and kiss up to folks. They
> will always come back to the table like foxes from the
> henhouse, with chicken feathers all over their lips saying "show me the
> chickens."

You should have attended Harald Welte's "Enforcing the GPL" talk at
the Linux Kongress this year. There are plenty of worked examples
where Harald and the Netfilter kernel developers have successfully
taken commercial vendors to court and got them to either (a) release
their enhancements under the GPL, or (b) stop distributing the GPL'ed
code. It can and has been done in the real world, with multiple
vendors, and they haven't lost a case yet.

- Ted