Neil, > On 14 Mar 2014, at 05:26, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email protected]> wrote: >> I hope you will all indulge me >> briefly when I shout: "YOU ALL ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY WITH THIS STUFF." :)
Neil Brown wrote at 06:26 (EDT): > Indulgence granted :) Thanks. :) > for Andrew and me, it is more a matter of identifying potential > ambiguity and discussing it - perhaps primarily out of pure > intellectual curiosity - than attempting to irk you (or Bruce), or to > create a cottage industry of "here's how to avoid the GPL" advisory > services. Well, if it were just about irking me, I wouldn't care. I would agree if someone said "you deserve to be irked once in a while". The issue is rather that I am in the (perhaps unique) position of having lived through situations where emails on this list (and/or others like it) have been studied by GPL violator defense counsel and *have been* introduced into evidence in GPL enforcement cases. In fact, I've been diposed more than once in GPL enforcement cases and presented with (and asked questions about) documents from mailing lists like this. To explain it another way: the situation reminds me of why I dropped out of my CS PhD program: I found that most people in academic computer science didn't care in the least about the sociopolitical ramifications of their work. They just loved the "problem", whatever problem they specialized in. Similarly, I feel that most people who discuss GPL have a tendency to look at the GPL as a document of nonpolitical academic interest, not as a key policy cornerstone that people have to go out there and use to defend software freedom. Admittedly, people give me (IMO an unduly) hard time about "failing to discuss dispassionately about these topics". I'm not dispassionate; by contrast, I'm emotionally invested, because I believe proprietary software harms people, and Free Software is the solution. In turn, GPL is the shield that defends people from that harm. So, damn right, I'm passionate. I even argue that those who take a dispassionate, "what if"-"devil's advocate"-kind-of attitude to GPL discussion (at best) are neutral on whether or not proprietary software harms society. That not only irks me, it creates real adversarial danger (or, at best, becomes useful raw material for such adversarial danger) for those of us fighting for software freedom and the GPL. > (If I genuinely have done something to irk you, you've got my contact > details, and do feel free to pick up off-list!) As I said, I don't mind if you irk me; feel free to do so any time you like. :) I just mind if, as an expert in licensing, you say something "devil's advocate"-ish today on this list that ends up in a culmination of you being called as an opposing witness to defend some GPL violator from whom I'm trying to compel their required GPL source code release. And, *that* is not a hypothetical scenario. I've *more than once* faced the defense naming as their expert witness participants in this list and others like it. Yes, I'm a admittedly a cynic, but given that fact above, I have to assume that anyone making odd statements about GPL compliance is going to get hired to fight against enforcement efforts later: it's happened before, it will happen again. GPL violators pay a lot more than my job does, pure and simple, so if one doesn't believe that proprietary software is harmful to society, one is likely to take such a job because it's, simply put, going to pay better than being on the "right side". Hopefully that explains why I get so upset when folks make such blatantly false claims like "making the offer for source ends your compliance obligations", even if done with a devil's advocate point of view. (As I've already said on the record, that claim has no basis.) And, to be a bit less cynical, I truly believe that nearly everyone who posts on this list is well-intentioned and wants software to be Free. My primary point here is there's a slippery slope of policy positions that starts at "devil's advocate" and ends with helping violators avoid their obligations under GPL. -- -- bkuhn
