Commercial users still take copyright issues pretty seriously because of the remedies available to copyright holders under title 17. Even if an author doesn't register the copyright until they want to begin the suit (you lose statutory damages and attorneys fees this way), they can get an injunction against further distribution and disgorgement of profits from the infringing work, so if you get caught, your product is dead and has made (you) no money. This is also why the FSF/SFLC has like a 100% success rate when it comes to extracting highly favorable settlements.

Without a doubt people still infringe, but it's not a complete free for all.

Definitely not a 100% success rate and I question "highly favorable" when settlements almost never result in a complete end to infringement by even the one entity settling and are so slow and expensive to get that thousands more spring up in the meantime...

If you have access to legal databases like Westlaw/Lexis, you can look up the lawsuits the FSF and SFLC have been a party to. All of those suits were settled and the plaintiffs secure monetary compensation, disclosure of the source code, and in some cases the ability to pre-screen future releases to make sure they're complying with the GPL. The reason why many shops take copyright seriously or ban the use of GPL software (you can argue either way that the latter is or is not a victory for the GPL) is because this creates a deterrent effect.

BTW, SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre) != SFC (Software Freedom Conservancy).

Conservancy recently got a grant for compliance work, and are working on an enforcement action in the IoT space:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

The bigger problem is that outside of the FSF and Conservancy, large amounts of the Linux developer community and several ostensibly Free Software companies/organisations do not want the GPL to be enforced at all.

There has been relatively high levels of support for normal / standard GPLv2 enforcement.

That said, the FSF and Conservancy like to pick more edge cases and go to absolute war on them. That doesn't generate as much support it is true and a lot of parts of the GPLv3 push also rubbed folks the wrong way.

"Linus says says GPL v3 violates everything that GPLv2 stood for"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU

is but one of many many examples here.

The focus of FSF and Conservancy is on freedoms; obtaining the code, reading the code, building the code, modifying the code, installing the modified code and running the modified code are essential freedoms and if they aren't possible for a person with the necessary skills and resources, then the license and the enforcement of the license are not achieving the goals of the Free Software and Open Source movements.

If anything, I would say that the amount of freedoms intended to be upheld by these licenses is not expansive enough, considering the SaaSS world that we live in now.

Linus isn't much qualified on any other topic that software development. For example what he describes as his "take" on GPL v2 and its purpose is at odds with what the people that actually wrote it have written and even a basic reading of the text.

What he is mistating is he liked the fact that you could for practical purposes ignore much of the idealogy that a) he has never cared for and b) has always clearly underpinned both v2 and v3 of the GPL license.

Pretending otherwise is only not a lie because charitably he doesn't know what he is talking about or isn't expressing himself very well.

If you want a useful opinion on law ask a lawyer not a programmer. Linus is not only unqualified he doesn't know he is unqualified.

Even relaxed "we only care about source release" GPLv2 enforcement is not desirable to Linus and other Linux developers.

And for good reason!

Linus and Greg KH's reasoning for avoiding lawsuits: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

The principles used by FSF/Conservancy operate their copyleft compliance efforts under are eminently reasonable and make it clear that lawsuits are a last resort that are only used when the violator is being unreasonable and blatantly violating the licenses.

https://www.fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Yes it's incredibly difficult for someone to understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it. It's important to note that Linux would likely not exist if PC makers had used the same lockdown methods as used today.

Moreover when GKH and Linus talk about how GPL enforcement has done nothing good, they conveniently leave out the success of WRT enforcement, which caused one of the biggest Linux offshoots, largely based on volunteer work.

Finally, the audacity of saying "let's talk about legal things without lawyers present" is such a typical software engineer thing, just imagine the reaction someone was proposing to talk about kernel programming without any kernel programmers present

BSD as in the software distribution almost didn't get to exist thanks to a lawsuit, but once that was cleared it was out. It Linux didn't exist, it would have taken over the niche.

Linux itself is not that special - it mostly is a case of right place and right time.

And even tbe FSF hasn't really done any enforcement in years. And major copyright holders on large GPL codebases (coughLinux) oppose any and all enforcement actions.

> I don't believe that any organization ... is capable of enforcing

Big companies are very capable, and often happy, to sue each other for reasons including breach of patent, copyright, trademark and much more. This includes GPL breaches.

The point of GPL is to build an ecosystem and create "herd immunity" against bad actors.

Protecting the rights of a lone developer VS a large corporation can be expensive and difficult - not because of the GPL - but because of how the legal system works in most parts of the world.

But that is besides the point.

What matters is building an ecosystem where 99% of the important entities do not systematically violate the license, and this is already happening.

Can you name a major tech company not actively violating the GPL (not to mention untold MIT and BSD licenses on JavaScript...) I'm not sure I can

Oh, many don't violate GPL by avoiding it like the plague (esp. GPL 3) and complying with the terms when they cannot.

BSD tends to be easier to comply to by including a license note somewhere within the manual or software. MIT has even fewer terms.

A minority of rich companies with lawyers to spare violate the GPL on some occasions without consequences. A fact you want to quantify by just making up a number and your conclusion is that based on your guess its not working and we ought to do what exactly? Reduce the barrier to nothing based on you not feeling actual enforcement would be too expensive or hard to obtain? You didn't really say.

To be fair, if you listen to Eben Moglen and some of the other big minds behind gpl(v3), it becomes readily apparent they have been working to build up strong methods to deal with this very problem by using a delaying tactic.

I think they might be onto something.

Regardless, Eben is such a mind you owe it to yourself to listen to some of his talks.

> as a software freedom die-hard myself.

> gpl is too difficult to enforce. throw hands up in the air

riiiigth.