Legal Group Releases Guide To GPL Compliance 141
An anonymous reader brings news that the Software Freedom Law Center has published a guide for compliance with the GNU General Public License. The purpose of the guide is to prevent "common mistakes" the SFLC has encountered during its various GPL violation investigations. Their suggestions include close scrutiny of software acquisitions, more precise tracking of changes and updates, and avoiding "build gurus." They also provide tips for dealing with a violation. The full guide is available at the SFLC's website.
Request: (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude - send a copy to the Utah State Attorney General's Office.
No, they did nothing wrong, but in 1999 when I was trying to explain that I wanted to put the GPL to use in my former classroom (all non public-domain copyrights are jointly held by a teacher and the State of Utah), most of the Dept'y Att'y General's responses consisted of "...I don't understand". I even pointed him to the GNU website), but he called back later and was still lost. Nice guy, sounded like a good lawyer, but he just couldn't wrap his brain around the concept.
Now that was nine years ago (!? Cripes I'm old),, and things may have changed, but pushing a copy of this new guide to all 50 US State Att'y General offices would, IMHO, not be a bad idea at all.
Re:Context people, context. (Score:2, Interesting)
The folks who should be concerned with the GPL are technical folks; not lawyers.
Re:Context people, context. (Score:1, Interesting)
I've not read the guide yet as I'm somewhat busy this afternoon.
Does it include any clarification of the requirement to provide source code? That one has always seemed ambiguous/fuzzy. Whenever it comes up in discussion here on /. there is always argument over who the source code must be provided to.
Having seen the arguing over this requirement so often I feel it is one that certainly could use some clarification.
Re:death to GPL (Score:3, Interesting)
The original phrase was "Copyleft: All rights reversed" [gnu.org]. The "reversed" means that the rights of the end user are protected more so than the rights of the developer (the more natural beneficiary of copyright) - to wit, the end user is preserved the rights to run the program for any reason, share the program, examine and learn from the source code, and build and distribute derivatives.
Berkeley et. al. focus on protecting the rights of the developer more than the end user - to wit, the developer can create proprietary products from such code and deny the above freedoms to their end users.
Since libertarian principles focus on individual liberty over corporate or state interests, I firmly believe that copyleft is clearly the more libertarian license, and choose it over the alternatives for my own modest endeavors. Its popularity [freedomdefined.org] indicates that I am not alone.
Oddly enough, I've been called "right-wing" on several occasions, but never "left-wing" (though it truth I'm neither). Go figure.
Your opinion may (and almost certainly will ;-) differ.
Re:Build Guru (Score:3, Interesting)
Some common things I see with GPL violations (Score:3, Interesting)
1.Companies who release software (usually embedded into a hardware device) and then claim "we are working on releasing the source code but its going to take time"
2.Build systems where one "master makefile" builds the entire project (usually with a "master config file" that selects which model you are building for, what features are turned off and on etc)
3.Companies who use a version of GCC and/or binutils that isn't publicly available and then dont release source code or binaries for that version, thus making it harder to recreate the binaries they are shipping (I wonder if creating a CPU with a new or altered instruction set, porting Linux to this CPU and then releasing kernel source but not GCC or binutils would be a GPL violation or not...)
4.Companies who release source code for one firmware revision and then dont release source code for other firmware revisions (*cough*Motorola Z6*cough*)
and 5.Companies who claim a need to "sanitize" GPL code before its released (this most likely includes removing any comments that reference internal intranet email addresses, web URLs, machine names, internal processes etc but may also include removal of pieces that are used only by or removal of comments/changing of code of pieces related to proprietary hardware so as not to release any more hardware details than they have to. Will likely also include removing anything embarrassing such as swear words)
7.1 covers an often-overlooked part of LGPL (Score:3, Interesting)
Section 7.1 of the article covers an often-overlooked part of the LGPL. If you include LGPL libraries as part of your application, the EULA must permit reverse engineering to debug the application if the end user modifies the library and uses the modified version, instead of the version that came with the software.
I suspect that there is a lot of software out there that includes LGPL libraries, but has a blanket "no reverse engineering" clause in the license agreement.