Software Freedom Conservancy's approach on the other hand is to require compliance. Through their lawsuit against Vizio they are also aiming to make it possible for any user of GPLed but non-compliant software to sue for compliance. Hopefully this will change the amount of spontaneous GPL compliance for Linux in the industry.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Got a link for that Apple firmware thing? Sounds interesting. We really need open firmware for hardware devices. There is some for very old hardware though.
So what? If it makes them comply then I'm fine with it. No one else has taken on the fight except for a handful of large companies (Vizio and a settop-box-manufacturer whose name I forgot are the only cases I remember). Everyone else, particularly in the phone and embedded sector, outright shits on the GPL for decades now.
Particularly Google would be in an excellent position - they possess the Android trademark, they could require manufacturers and SoC vendors to properly open-source their stuff as part of the Android license, even for AOSP-powered devices.
Governments could also step in, similarly to enforcement of patents, but no government in the world has done anything to establish legal protection for open source that does not rely on open-source authors filing lawsuits on their own! Just imagine customs going on a trade fair and confiscating every device where the GPL and other OSS licenses are not obliged. After two rounds, no one would dare mess around any longer.
> Got a link for that Apple firmware thing?
Unfortunately not, that was many years ago and I might be remembering it wrong :(
Conservancy are doing the Vizio lawsuit, do a lot of behind-the-scenes work, supported the VMware lawsuit, did a lawsuit against Best Buy/Samsung/Westinghouse/JVC and did one of the earliest compliance actions against Linksys resulting in the OpenWRT project:
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/past-lawsuits.... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st...
Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org did a lot of GPL compliance actions in Germany, admittedly none recently.
It would be great if Google could do GPL compliance actions against Android vendors, but they seem to be moving away from GPL projects instead of embracing them, so that seems very unlikely.
There was already a case where a Linux copyright holder got the USA customs department to withhold import of some GPL violating tablets. I think that eventually resulted in compliance, the details are somewhere on LWN, I forget the URL though.
I think if the Vizio lawsuit is concluded in favor of Conservancy, that is probably the best chance for widespread GPL compliance.
An infringement lawsuit can't make anyone comply because a court will only ever order an infringer to pay monetary damages. An infringer might settle a lawsuit by agreeing to comply with GPL terms instead of paying damages, but that's not something a court would order.
Theoretically, if the GPL were a contract (an exchange of promises) and not a license (a grant subject to conditions), then a court could order a party in breach to comply with its terms. A court would only do that, however, if monetary damages were insufficient to compensate the non-breaching party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_remedy
The Conservancy lawsuit against Vizio contends that the GPL is also a contract and that downstream users are third-party beneficiaries of that contract, so they should be able to sue for compliance with the contract. Its a really interesting approach and I hope they win. I encourage you to read the court documents, they make for interesting reading.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
Also, monetary damages are pretty much always insufficient in GPL cases, since money doesn't get you source code. I guess if the money was enough to pay for reverse engineering and reimplementation of the fixes/features present in the non-compliant codebase, then they could be enough.
Exactly.
True, but the community does clean up and upstream stuff over time. It's just very slow work, made even more confusing by how much SoC hardware components are duplicated with small variations in different platforms. De-duplicating and merging drivers for some random IP block can involve pretty serious effort
Most drivers in the embedded world come from the BSPs (board support packages) of the SoC vendor. And holy hell wherever you look at leaked source code (cough Mediatek) it's madness. Nothing is upstreamed because the quality is so shoddy that you'd get Linus Torvalds into a proper ragepost if you dared to post it for submission, and as a result Android and most of embedded Linux is stuck at outright fossilized kernels where it's extremely hard to backport anything from newer kernels - which is also the reason why so few Android phones are supported for longer than two or three years after initial release. The SoC vendors simply won't provide BSP updates because of the effort involved.
And forget about copyright requiring vendors to open-source everything in Linux kernel space... most simply do not care and there is absolutely no will of enforcing it on a large scale - to the contrary, people trying to do so got booted off [1].
The proprietary blobs for components like WiFi/BT/GPU are only the icing on the cake. Barely any effort made to ensure it actually holds up in real world usage, only enough to pass qualification testing. IIRC Apple had at least one RF vendor make a completely new firmware for their chips because the official one was riddled with bugs.
[1]: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick-mchardy-g...