Neil Brown asked me:
> Is it your perception that the majority of GPL violations arise from
> "wealthy companies", or just that those which are most often brought to
> light, or perhaps those which are considered worth pursuing, are by wealthy
> companies?
When I line up just about any company next to Conservancy or FSF, they are
*all* wealthy compared to those orgs, so my perspective is admittedly skewed.
But, that said, the violators that give us the most trouble coming into
compliance are usually wealthy corporations who expend more resources on
skirting their responsibilities than on trying to comply.
In my experience, most violators that are small companies tend to be
regretful of their failure to comply and work quickly to come back into
compliance. Thus, they don't typically require long, drawn-out multi-year
efforts (with outside legal counsel involved) to achieve GPL compliance.
By contrast, in my experience, larger, wealthier violators effectively have
"money to burn" on fighting on every single compliance issue and seeing "what
they can get away with".
(There are exceptions to this, of course, the above is a generalization.)
However, what's worse is that these wealthy violators have created a
distributing cottage industry. There are now an entire group of well-known
outside counsel who specialize (in part) in defending wealthy violators that
want to avoid complying with GPL. An anecdote to exemplify that:
A few years ago, at OSCON, one of these lawyers came up to me, shook my hand,
and thanked me for enforcing the GPL because it had been "so good for his
business". I told him that he just made me want to puke, and I meant that
literally: I felt sick to my stomach the rest of that day just thinking about
what he'd said. Frankly and sadly, making a bunch of seedy lawyers rich has
been an unfortunate side-effect of upholding the rights granted by the GPL.
That said, the alternative is to let the violators get away with it, which is
a much worse outcome.
I should finish by saying that there are at least a few wealthy companies
that have a good ethos and have chosen to do the right thing and are
wonderful actors on GPL compliance. I don't want to name names lest I leave
any of them out, but some of their representatives even subscribe to this
mailing list and answer questions. :)
My view on that: it's really unfair to those few companies who spend so much
money on getting compliance right that there are so many competitors who
would rather pay high priced outside counsel than just comply with the
license.
-- bkuhn
