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Tomas M. It also might be worth listening to the experience from the Linux guys, why legal GPL fights are bad for the GPL: historically the SFC’s biggest victories were with forcing companies using the Busybox [a Linux toolkit for embedded environments] to comply with the GPL. While the developers won in court, Torvalds claims that all that really happened was “a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Both the original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.” Therefore, when he looks at Kuhn’s legal saber-rattling, Torvalds response is: “Let’s be clear about this: lawsuits destroy. They don’t ‘protect.’ Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we’ve built up over the years by being nice.” In short: “The fact is, lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) do not make for friends. You just look like a bully.” Instead, Torvalds prefers Kroah-Hartman’s approach: “We do it quietly, working with companies, from within, convincing them that yes, this license that seems so strange and crazy is really worth following, not only because it is the law (companies ignore the law all the time, it’s called risk management), but because it turns out it is the right thing to do from a business point of view. It’s cheaper to do so, the benefit is huge, and the return on investment is immense when they join together to work with us, instead of off in their own bubble.”
Tomas M.
It also might be worth listening to the experience from the Linux guys, why legal GPL fights are bad for the GPL:
historically the SFC’s biggest victories were with forcing companies using the Busybox [a Linux toolkit for embedded environments] to comply with the GPL. While the developers won in court, Torvalds claims that all that really happened was “a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Both the original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.” Therefore, when he looks at Kuhn’s legal saber-rattling, Torvalds response is: “Let’s be clear about this: lawsuits destroy. They don’t ‘protect.’ Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we’ve built up over the years by being nice.” In short: “The fact is, lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) do not make for friends. You just look like a bully.” Instead, Torvalds prefers Kroah-Hartman’s approach: “We do it quietly, working with companies, from within, convincing them that yes, this license that seems so strange and crazy is really worth following, not only because it is the law (companies ignore the law all the time, it’s called risk management), but because it turns out it is the right thing to do from a business point of view. It’s cheaper to do so, the benefit is huge, and the return on investment is immense when they join together to work with us, instead of off in their own bubble.”
historically the SFC’s biggest victories were with forcing companies using the Busybox [a Linux toolkit for embedded environments] to comply with the GPL. While the developers won in court, Torvalds claims that all that really happened was “a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Both the original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.”
Therefore, when he looks at Kuhn’s legal saber-rattling, Torvalds response is: “Let’s be clear about this: lawsuits destroy. They don’t ‘protect.’ Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we’ve built up over the years by being nice.”
In short: “The fact is, lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) do not make for friends. You just look like a bully.”
Instead, Torvalds prefers Kroah-Hartman’s approach: “We do it quietly, working with companies, from within, convincing them that yes, this license that seems so strange and crazy is really worth following, not only because it is the law (companies ignore the law all the time, it’s called risk management), but because it turns out it is the right thing to do from a business point of view. It’s cheaper to do so, the benefit is huge, and the return on investment is immense when they join together to work with us, instead of off in their own bubble.”
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