Re: Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3

Rob Landley
2007-06-15T03:19:21Z

On Thursday 14 June 2007 05:32:47 Bernd Paysan wrote:
> On Thursday 14 June 2007 03:24, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Harald is in Germany, and he therefore takes legal action against people
> > distributing products violating his copyright on the Linux kernel
> > in Germany at German courts based on German laws.
>
> And if Tivo did sell their crap in Germany, I bet, Harald had brought them
> down years ago (as he did in the "tivoized" Siemens router case). But Tivo
> doesn't (they started in the UK, and stopped doing so right after Harald
> unlocked that Siemens router ;-), and in the US, courts may think
> different. Or they rely that there simply is no Harald Welte in the US, who
> goes after the violators.

On http://www.busybox.net the March 26, 2006 entry reads:

> 27 March 2006 -- Software Freedom Law Center representing BusyBox and
> uClibc One issue Erik Andersen wanted to resolve when handing off BusyBox
> maintainership to Rob Landley was license enforcement. BusyBox and uClibc's
> existing license enforcement efforts (pro-bono representation by Erik's
> father's law firm, and the Hall of Shame), haven't scaled to match the
> popularity of the projects. So we put our heads together and did the
> obvious thing: ask Pamela Jones of Groklaw for suggestions. She referred us
> to the fine folks at softwarefreedom.org.
>
> As a result, we're pleased to
> announce that the Software Freedom Law Center has agreed to represent
> BusyBox and uClibc. We join a number of other free and open source software
> projects (such as X.org, Wine, and Plone in being represented by a fairly
> cool bunch of lawyers, which is not a phrase you get to use every day.

See also the September 29, 2006 entry where we set up an email address to
forward license violation reports directly to them so we wouldn't have to
deal with any of it.

I'd say this "hasn't cost me a dime", but I believe I'm on my third stamp.

(I also note that I'm not busybox maintainer anymore and Erik isn't uclibc
maintainer anymore either, but since it's our copyrights they're basing the
enforcement actions on, they still bounce an email off us every few months.)

Rob
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.