How do they triage and decide what to pursue?
The dominant legal theory is that the GPL can only be enforced by the party holding the copyright. SFC's lawsuit against Vizio is strategically trying to establish precedent changing that; establishing that end-users are "third party beneficiaries" under the GPL, so others can enforce the GPL; but for now the copyright holder is the only one who can enforce it.
So the FSF could only take it up if the violation is on projects that do copyright-assignment to the FSF (i.e.: most GNU stuff). If you do find a violation of GNU stuff, the process is "email license-violation@gnu.org". I do not know what process Craig and Krzysztof use when triaging reports and deciding what to pursue.
Many Linux-kernel contributors (also, SFC member projects such as OpenWrt, Git, Qemu) have assigned their copyright to SFC or named SFC as their legal representative (also, SFC member projects; so SFC can take up something like this. Similarly, you can report violations to them by emailing compliance@sfconservancy.org (see https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html for more info).
Now, SFC is aware of more violations than they could ever possibly pursue, so they're strategic about pursuing ones that are high-impact. I'm not sure how they decide that. But I can say that medical devices are near-and-dear to them, between executive-director Karen Sandler's implanted defibrillator and policy-fellow Bradley Kühn's blood glucose monitor.
I saw that spelling for the first time last week, I think.
Did he change his name? Has he always been Kühn, but went with Kuhn, because Umlaute are hard for Americans?
The FSF could help a lot here by publishing demand letter templates outlining the statutory and precedential basis for license enforcement and recovery of damages.
This is technically not true. It is an oversimplification of the common case, but what actually normally should happen is that:
1. The GPL requires the company to send the user a written offer of source code.
2. The user uses this offer to request the source code from the company.
3. If the user does not recieve the source code, the user can sue the company for not honoring its promises, i.e. the offer of source code. This is not a GPL violation; it is a straight contract violation; the contract in this case being the explicit offer of source code, and not the GPL.
Note that all this is completely off the rails if the user does not recieve a written offer of source code in the first place. In this case, the user has no right to source code, since the user did not recieve an offer for source code.
However, the copyright holders can immediately sue the company for violating the GPL, since the company did not send a written offer of source code to the user. It does not matter if the company does or does not send the source code; the fact that the company did not send a written offer is in itself a GPL violation.
(IANAL)
That doesn't sound right to me.
A written offer is not the same thing as a contract.
A written offer on its own would not normally be directly enforceable in many (most?) jurisdictions, for the same sort of reason that retailers can't be held to incorrectly published prices (in the UK at least, a displayed price is an “invitation to tender”, not a contract or other promise) except where other laws/regulations (anti bait&switch rules for instance), or the desire to avoid fighting in the court of public opinion, come into effect.
But in this instance, the written offer and the response to that offer are part of the wider licence that has been agreed to.
In my experience, this is quite common when the development of hardware is viewed as a cost center and is outsourced to various providers and teams. Those providers and teams churn a lot and nobody who worked on that is likely still involved with the company via contracts or direct employment.
Front line support people aren’t equipped to respond to these requests. If you’re lucky they’ll get bounced around internally while project managers play hot potato with the e-mail until it gets forgotten. You might get lucky if you go the corporate legal route, but more likely is that the lawyers will do the math on the likelihood of you causing them actual legal trouble for anything and decide it’s best to ignore it.
When I worked at a company that had a history of GPL drama one of the first things I did was enforce a rule that every release had a GPL tarball that was archived and backed up. We educated support people on where to forward requests. I handled them myself. 7 out 10 times, the person on the other end was angry because they assumed the GPL entitled them to all of our source code and they were disappointed when they only found GPL code in the tarball. It really opened my eyes to some of the craziness you get exposed to with these requests (though clearly not the polite and informed request in this Reddit thread) which is probably another reason why support staff are uneasy about engaging with these requests.
Well, if your non-GPL code direcly linked to, or closely interoperated with, any GPL code, those users would have been right.
Please for the love of all that the FSF thinks is holy - just file a damn lawsuit if you are telling me they are violating the law. State your claim and have a court sort it out.
It costs hundreds of dollars. For a medical device? Seems like a good deal.
raverbashing•1h ago
caminanteblanco•1h ago
themafia•15m ago