Related, check out Rossmann’s new video on how they’ve corrupted the Farm Bureau that’s supposed to represent the farmers, and thereby got their lobby group to surreptitiously lobby against their own industry by killing meaningful provisions in right to repair.
John Deere is a horrible company whose upper management needs to be wiped from the industry.
It really does beg the question, if JD is so bad why do people keep buying them? Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks.
Buying something is a not a simple issue, there are multiple factors that go into the decision, and for many, buying something is not really a decision either, because the odds are stacked against them. Also, it might be that JD is not horrible to each buyer equally: some might not perceive these issues at all. And some might just treat it as a business, and write off the grievances as business expenses. They are okay as there are also other things to take care of.
Amazon is also a company with many criticisms, and yet, they are very popular. And I'm sure the list goes on.
So from an economic pov: it's a market failure. From an individual's pov: because purchase is complex.
Regarding your last point: "Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks."
I agree, and still think RTR is very important. For a comparison, take any public health issue. Are, for example, unhealthy foods popular? Very much so. Is it still worth it for the people to regulate it? Absolutely. Issues such as this are not well served by treating it as a popularity contest, because if it would be up to the children, all of the meals would be candy. Experts, who have much deeper insights into the workings of their area can give much better advice.
4) Only JD has anything that would prevent #2 (without collapsing the whole farm).
Buying JD is... pretty reasonable in that scenario. It's one of the reasons captured markets are so bad, it lets companies get away with a lot of things they couldn't if the market were actually fair and competitive.
My understanding, most farmers are backed into a corner where there is not a viable option to go with someone else. JD has extensively made access to repair facilities convenient and sometimes for many farmers, it is the only repair center remotely. If they go with a tractor from a different brand and it does need to be taken to a repair facility, you may have to ship it or drive it a long way or wait for a tech travel to your farm. This might mean your tractor is out of service for weeks. But JD has repair centers all over and JD can turn your tractor around in 3 days or less.
In highschool, I worked a couple seasons picking tobacco. Farmers love to be able to repair their tractors. Repair and maintenance work is something that can also give them something to do over the winter when they are not working the fields much if they limp along until then. Most farmers purchase them because as mentioned, there isn't really a reasonable alternative in the event it is something that actually does need to "go into the shop." I also would not be surprised if most of JD's sales were from corporate farms and smalls farmers are still using their grand daddy's tractor. The farm I worked on, the farmer was still using a 50 year old international harvester. Doing all of his own maintenance and repair work.
Yep - I know a pineapple farmer (who has a variety of new and old tractors of different brands) and in the extended stretches between planting and picking he repairs the older tractors (some are around 40 years old).
JD is still one of the best of the (horrible) options, and in some areas is the only option. Also, most of the people I have talked to about it had no idea how bad it was. They've been buying JD all their lives and some of those purchases stick around for decades, so many of them have other JD equipment that is older and much more friendly. They assume things are still the same.
This translates to an absurd argument that anything large companies do is right because if they didn’t do right they wouldn’t be large.
For example: Why do people keep buying BP gas after they were responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history? Maybe people don’t care about the environment?
The answer in all cases is that being a wealthy company with a lot of market penetration doesn’t mean your actions are ethically or morally right, or that your customers agree with them.
As I write this you've been moderated into the grey zone.
I think that means that a lot of people think that RTR is super important and you are wrong. But you can't be wrong because you didn't make a statement. You asked a question. And it is an important question. People assume your position on the question just because you asked it. This is a serious mistake.
RTR fans cannot solve the problem until they can unravel the answers to this question.
One obvious answer to the question is that there are very few alternatives to JD. How do we solve that? Well, lots and lots of money. How do we come up with lots of money?
Um.. sell an alternative to JD? Ok, not practical on day one. Sell an alternative to Kubota? Hmmm... difficult. But that's probably where it needs to start. So, raise a lot of money to build an alternative to Kubota? Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups.
I don't have millions of money, but I have approached a few efforts I hoped could go somewhere. No luck so far. The opportunity is there for the right somebody to run with. Perhaps starting with riding mowers could lead to something. It might take longer, but sooner started sooner done.
> Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups.
John Deere isn't evil because the people in charge decided, one day, to start twirling their moustaches. We can assume the issue is systematic. Would a startup be insulated from the same pressures and incentives that created – or permitted – John Deere?
Questions like that led to the GPL. They have led to other innovations as well. Yes, some people are always trying to figure a way around GPL and around every other well-intentioned thing. But still, BSD, MIT, MPL, and lots of other efforts have allowed the world to have and preserve some amazing things. And we need to keep asking those questions and keep coming up with spectacular answers.
Every great answer allows us to iterate better and better on what this world can be. Every great answer starts with a great question.
Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? They certainly don't respect the right to repair either.
Likewise, people buy JD because it's a well-known brand.
If you asked people what they wanted 100 years ago, they would say they wanted a faster horse. It's hard to advocate for something that people don't realize they don't have.
Farmers are pretty knowledgeable about the equipment they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on. The idea they're just picking JD because of name recognition is insulting.
Maybe I'm just in my small bubble and/or the situation in Germany is quite different, but when I look at the farms in the area I grew up in, including my father's farm, then most of them are absolutely loyal to whatever brand their family has been using for centuries. My father didn't even test or look at others brands when he bought his tractors.
I understand that, when they work, the products are amazing, even up to the point that Deere can obtain satellite imagery of a farm and work it autonomously, without the owner of the equipment present.
Many times, the products do not work, and repair is locked to approved equipment that is confirmed and authorized remotely - no authorization, no repair, no operational equipment.
The last Defcon conference shattered the control that the corporation is able to exercise over this equipment, because of bad security design. There is a major effort to rethink (and improve) this control, but everything on the market now is irretrievably broken from the perspective of the embedded electronics preventing unauthorized repairs.
There are other problems, one involving a fatality at a recent union strike, the GPL violations above, right to repair, and the (lack of) staff to correctly address said adversity.
Speaking generally and not just about RTR, people often recognize something is "wrong" and that they're negatively affected, but they also don't really understand what's going on, so they can't do much other than complain when they get screwed over.
I guess the logical conclusion is that a company can be "bad" and yet still have people buy from them.
Edit: To be clear, I guess I'd just say your question is sort of illogical. I see no reason one should assume a company needs to be "good" for people to buy from it.
Despite being downvoted, you're largely correct. John Deere's primary customer base are mega-farms who don't really mind treating tractors as a service. This does screw over smaller farmers though who are already struggling to compete.
individual decision makers on farms are systematically replaced by corporate farming over decades; restricting sales to authorized dealers, and assigning those dealers exclusive territory, was done systematically for the last seventy years. If JD dismantles effective competition in the 1970s, who exactly is there to provide competitive alternatives? It is a "captured market" in the USA. "view from the City"
Patents. Intellectual property. You cannot make a tractor without JD's blessing. We do not live in a free market where you can just "make your own" and sell it.
Seriously? The patent on a basic / home-made tractor must have expired by now. I suspect finding a buyer (not to mention making it) would be more challenging that the legal issues.
On the other hand, calling people sociopathic (over a pretty open question) is totally normal and shows a very mentally stable outlook at life. Sociopathy is when an outside to the farming world wonders what value john deer actually provided to farmer if they seemingly overlook the massive caveats that we regularly hear about. Obviously.
1. You'll note I didn't call him a sociopath. One does not have to be a sociopath to believe a sociopathic take. In this case, merely being deceived by anarcho-capitalist rhetoric explains why the person I'm responding to believes this.
2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation.
3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
I don't disagree about your last point, and I even agree that HN has some truly awful takes that can be almost 100% guaranteed to pop up whenever certain topics are discussed.
It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing.
In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here.
So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)
> It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing.
Sure, and it's a legitimate question. If the person I was responding to had merely asked a question, I wouldn't have posted what I did. But, he followed up with a statement which showed the question was rhetorical.
Since it seems like you're genuinely curious, I'll offer what insight I have (which isn't much). I'm not a farmer but I've lived around farmers and get my food from community-supported agriculture (CSAs) wherever possible, which puts me in direct contact with farmers a lot, and we talk.
In a lot of areas, John Deere is the only company with local distribution, meaning that if you want to buy a new tractor, you have to either buy John Deere or pay for delivery. The new alternatives are not particularly good, either, since economies of scale force them to either charge more, or cut quality to cut cost. Kubota, for example, is one of the few alternatives with wide distribution, but are known for quality issues.
The alternative which most smaller-scale farmers seem to prefer is actually buying used, but that preference is reflected in the price: good-condition used tractors from the 80s or earlier run for about 3x the price of equivalent new tractors. Most of these old machines were overbuilt and therefore don't break down often if maintained well, but when they do break down, parts aren't available and mechanics don't know how to work on them. The CSA I went to in upstate NY had a farmer on staff who knew how to work on their two tractors--and pretty much only those two. And building a patchwork tractor fleet out of various different used tractors obviously scales poorly.
Tractors are possibly the least complicated machines John Deere sells, and for many of the products they sell, such as tillers, planters, etc., they have no large-scale competition, and some of these machines didn't exist 40 years ago, at least not in their modern forms. With the exception of a pull-behind tiller, the CSAs I've been to don't have this equipment, instead doing this labor by hand. Part of the reasoning behind this is that it's more sustainable, but I suspect that's at least partly putting a positive spin on being priced out. Modern versions of these complicated machines are more reliable than older versions because they coordinate the complicated interactions digitally (no moving parts involved in coordination) rather than mechanically. This digital control is precisely where John Deere is violating the GPL and people's right to repair.
Finally, some farmers are locked in by inertia: they bought and trusted John Deere for generations before John Deere started using software monopolistically, and didn't experience any of the problems until their newest equipment started breaking down, which might have only happened recently.
In general, part of the fallacy of anarcho-capitalism is that unregulated competition is stable: eventually one competitor becomes dominant and can use that position to no longer have to compete on serving the customer's needs. That's where John Deere is, and they'll continue to behave monopolistically as long as they are allowed to. True capitalism requires a strong central authority to prevent anti-competitive practices through regulation. If anarcho-capitalists really believe that unregulated capitalism results in the best results for consumers, then they should have no problem with regulating in favor of consumers, since it's just making rules that companies have to do what they're going to do anyway.
If JD is so great, why do people complain about them and lobby for laws against the worst of their behavior?
If the Farm Bureau is so bad, why doesn't JD simply leave the US market, instead of corrupting that bureau to their own ends?
If you're playing a game, and you think the only moves available are "buy" or "don't buy", while your opponent uses a plethora of other moves, you will lose, and lose bad.
The RIAA filed a lawsuit against Napster in December 1999. A preliminary injunction to block RIAA music on Napster was granted in August, 2000. Napster appealed and the circuit court upheld the injunction in February 2001. The injunction was effective as of March 2001 and Napster shut down in July 2001. Some of the lawsuit was settled out of court in September 2001. Napster went bankrupt in September 2002.
So that's 15 months for a slam-dunk injunction. Today it wouldn't take as long since there's case law backing them up. But if the RIAA had spent 2 years sending emails and writing blog posts, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere either.
Yes, but the endgame of the GPL is not to generate copyright infringement lawsuits[0]. It's to compel modifiers of the code to license their changes back and respect user freedom - i.e. to keep the software effectively uncopyrighted.
If you sue in a court of law, they will give you money damages, and maybe an injunction specifically requiring the developer delete their copy of the program. Under no circumstances will a court demand specific performance of GPL obligations to release source code. But that's what the SFC wants. So the only way to get people to comply with the GPL is to use the threat of a lawsuit to encourage compliance.
This is contrary to what we normally think of with copyright litigation, but that's mostly because the lawsuits we see are either breakdowns of negotiation, or against individual infringers and pirate sites that would never be granted a license under any circumstances whatsoever. When you want a licensee to actually do something, you are better off threatening litigation and negotiating rather than going straight to the nuclear option.
[0] Nobody told that to the Lawnmower Man[1] unfortunately
Most of these violating companies don't care about lawsuits, the big ones could probably bankrupt anyone trying to sue them by dragging things out and the small ones just make a product, fold the company and start a new one.
I found the latest Conservancy lawsuit interesting, they are suing as a third-party beneficiary of the GPL (ie as a recipient of GPL code), not as a copyright holder. They are suing solely for compliance, not for damages. Hopefully they get back their costs too though.
> Under no circumstances will a court demand specific performance of GPL obligations to release source code.
I wonder why not though. If that’s the clear terms of the license, and there’s some implied consent when using a library, and others knowingly used the library with the right terms, why can’t the courts find it fair?
Basically, Atari wanted to port some old Humongous Entertainment games to Wii, they hired a contractor, who hired a contractor, who downloaded SCUMMVM and ported it to the Wii. Of course, Nintendo's SDK terms specifically forbid source code disclosure, and they did not disclose source code of their port of this emulator.
So if a court specifically compelled performance of the GPL's license obligations, then they'd also be compelling Atari to violate their agreement with Nintendo. So does Nintendo now get to sue Atari for being sued by SCUMMVM's development team and losing? Or does the court get to override Nintendo's NDAs to satisfy the GPL? What if they chose the opposite: overriding the GPL to preserve Nintendo's NDAs? Neither of those outcomes really jive with the core idea of copyright, because they all rely on having one infringed party "step on" the other's ownership, with courts having to decide who wins and loses.
Presumably the judge wouldn't want either agreement to be violated, so would go with the third option, which hopefully satisfies both agreements at the same time; the Nintendo store gets to take down the ported old games from Atari. Then perhaps the contractor gets sued for not providing source code legally suitable for the Wii SDK.
Filing a suit does not take years. If you know you have a case, decide if you’re going to sue, if yes, then you bang out the paperwork and file it with the appropriate court. Trying to fight what ought to be a lawsuit through PR isn’t going to get you any closer to an injunction or discovery but is a red flag that maybe the one engaging in the PR battle doesn’t feel confident they have a case.
EDIT: I dug into it a little. SFC appears to be dug into a lawsuit against Vizio. It makes sense, even law firms have finite resources, and there’s some indication that the outcome of this lawsuit could give a clearer indication of the viability of a suit against John Deere. My original point on the time it takes to file a suit stands though.
A suit against John Deere is a lot harder in the way that the Vizio suit is being done (there they are suing as an end-user, a third-party beneficiary of the GPL contract), because you would have to be a Deere customer first (presumably that would cost more money than Conservancy's budget for the Vizio lawsuit) and if you do sue, maybe they stop selling you tractors or software updates or stop taking your phone calls. A regular copyright violation lawsuit might be a better option.
I'd prefer something a bit closer to the other end of the spectrum of defending open software licenses.
The other end of the spectrum might be an outcome like "Some GPL library authors find themselves suddenly owning a major farming machinery company". :)
Most GPL violations are really minor and suing over them creates backlash that's worse than the original violation. So the reasonable path is to ask nicely and then... ask nicely in public.
How far does it differ from the SfC’s stated attitude towards enforcement? I guess that they are behaving the way they said they would, and maybe you dislike that but you could at least have predicted it. Do they say they do something different?
They are a small org with limited resources, so that isn't surprising. They do sue companies though, their most recent lawsuit (against Vizio), if they win, will also allow any recipient of GPLed code to sue for compliance.
It's sad. My grandfather before he passed last year owned and drove 64 1/2 mustang. Over it's lifetime he's had to repair it now and again but it's still running great almost 60 years later. How long until Tesla declares some year of cars no longer maintainable? How long until they stop pushing software updates? How long will the deny people the ability to repair their own cars?
automotive right to repair is enshrined in law, but it isn't perpetual.
law dictates that parts must be made for any automobile for 10 years after that specific model year stops being manufactured. that's it. law does not say that the parts must be made in sufficient quantity, nor does it limit pricing of the parts, but the parts must be made and be made available to consumers for 10 years.
10 years is all you get, and at the rate of the continued advancement of safety features, I would not want to be driving anything more than 10 years old at any time. That Mustang will gladly pierce your heart and sever your spine with its steering column in a 30Mph head-on collision.
Here is an economic example of why this issue is so important to farmers. GPL is an important part of this issue. If JD is violating it's GPL license then it shouldn't enjoy the economic benefit of using that software.
"A lot more farmers, in fact. Enough to drive up the price of something like an 800-hour 1979 John Deere 4640 to over $60,000 at a Minnesota auction last August, which is more than double the price a well-worn example would fetch, but still a bargain compared to a new $150,000 rig. (Tractors' lives are measured in hours of operation, not miles, with the average hard-working farm tractor logging around 500 hours per year.) Imagine buying a '79 Pontiac Trans Am with 20,000 miles on it, and you get the picture. The difference is, no farmer is paying that much for a low-hour tractor from the Carter Administration without planning on using it day in and day out until it breaks—then fixing it on their own, on the cheap."
I think, even if for the pure marketing of it, one of Deere’s competitors should seize the opportunity to offer “open” equipment. I’m not a farmer, but I did grow up fixing my own cars and such… I can’t imagine any “killer feature” farm equipment has that Deere provides that would require such a closed package. Reliability and serviceability could be those killer features.
Farming equipment is quite expensive and typically what is used in a particular region depends on the dealer network. And the dealer network what gives John Deere the power to play these dirty games.
The normal interpretation is that it includes Configure scripts, Makefiles etc. The SFC claim it also requires things like the encryption keys needed to load the software on that specific device.
As most people are aware, GPLv3 added explicit requirement for such keys.
The SFC claims that the GPLv2 always required the ability to install modofied software on the device that shipped with GPL (except in cases like ROM, where nobody can modify), and what the GPLv3 is about prohibiting device makers from making their proprietary software stop working when users install modified versions of GPL'd software.
I have also heard of at least one other party that asked Stallman flat out if GPLv3 allowed for providing keys that allow for installation of modified versions of the free software software, but where use of such keys bricked the proprietary software that came with the device. Stallman allegedly indicated that it was, which if true counters the SFC narrative.
Conservancy says the GPLv3 doesn't prevent a vendor from breaking their proprietary software when GPLv3 software is updated (which is what TiVo did, for GPLv2 software):
Unfortunately those slides directly contradict the blog post I linked, whose thesis is basically that the installation relevant difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is only that GPLv3 requires the proprietary software to continue to run (for "User Products"), and GPLv3 specifically requires the keys, but that both still require that end users have the ability to run modified versions of the GPL software on the device, either by giving keys, or by offering the ability to disable secure boot, etc.
> [so], these words in GPLv3: “The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.” mean that the proprietary software that is not a combined work with the GPLv3'd work must also function?
> Stallman replied on 2012-05-06 with:
> Absolutely. And I wrote it specifically to do that!
At this point it's starting to seem like the GPL was only ever a bluff and it's being called on us now....
As someone who uses Linux every day this hurts and makes me wonder what the future will be as hardware gets locked away from us with the very tools we made to use it.
The GPL has been validated in court many times by now. That doesn't mean they'll win this case but there's a significant amount of precedent protecting it at this point.
Edit: It's remarkable to see a raft of uninformed comments here. What's up with that? Once most people in HN knew the story of Linux, Gnu and so forth.
The more topics you are knowledgeable about on HN, the more glaring the mass lack of competence the comments generally have except for topics like algorithms. Especially on anything bordering economics, medicine, and some others. It's similar to knoll's law. The libertarian / austrian (economics) skews are sometimes wild, and equally wildly inaccurate, sometimes bordering on conspiracy / delusional thinking.
I don't think I've gotten that much more knowledgeable in the last few years but maybe I should take that as the explanation for HN seeming to decline - it's certainly the most flattering possibility.
Every now and then when I've got some time to kill I'll go look at old comment sections (particularly when Dang links previous iterations of a discussion) and compare it to what I see today. It turns out that the quality hasn't changed greatly, though viewpoints, popular gripes, etc may have. I've discovered that a lot of my thoughts about "hn is going to shit" are usually better phrased as "I dislike that this viewpoint is popular now" or "I've come around to seeing that differently". Particularly when it turns out I preserved my old viewpoint in the form of a comment on the old article.
A related thing is: look through places where the crowd skews young/newb like r/programmerhumor. You'll see arguments, discussions, etc about things that might make you think "I thought that was settled ages ago" but in reality were just things you got experienced perspective on, and/or grew out of.
People grow and change - usually in a slow and steady way that's hard to see in the mirror. I suspect you've picked up a lot of knowledge and some new perspectives - a few years is a long time!
This is like saying copyright is a bluff because a corporate violates a person's rights and that person doesn't have the resources of a corporation to immediately go after them.
I want to make a product, I don't even mind giving away the code. I'm just worried since its an embedded system, its hard to update or whatever. As many times as I read the legal stuff, its over my head. I can't understand how you can let someone update part of the code on something compiled. Its not like I'm going to have a screen on my device to let users read the code either.
If someone wants to fight a legal battle, its really due to my incompetence, not malice.
I'll chime with my experience in embedded systems. In the last 2-3 companies I've worked with the directive has been "no GPLv3/LGPLv3, period. You will be fired if you ship with it." The legal departments just don't want to deal with it at all.
For [L]GPLv2 it's super simple - release any changed code and anything that links closely to it. If you publish all your source you basically can't fail to do this right.
For GPLv3, it's that simple most of the time. You talk about embedded which suggests you may be thinking primarily of the "tivoization" clauses designed to prevent user lockout. Again, if you're a fully open source project this will be hard to fail because the user should be able to just copy whatever you do in development. It's when you try to prevent user updates while allowing your own that this applies.
Maybe offer the source code at the point of purchase? Could even sell USB/SD with source code on it. Folks who want the code offline can buy them and copy the code where they want it.
OTOH, the internet is a "medium customarily used for software interchange" so maybe that would be fine, but the internet wouldn't "accompany" the device. Also, in GPLv2 you are allowed to just send a note "you can get source from us delivered on a storage device for $X", so if you do the purchase thing, plus write a note with every device about how to get the code on the internet or on disk, you should be fine.
I suspect that publishing it public to the internet is sufficient. If you really wanna cover your ass offer to mail someone the source on a CD for "reasonable handling fees"... which can reasonably be fairly high if someone demands such service.
This was changed in GPLv3. To my reading, section 6(b)(2) means that if you're distributing a physical product, you can just include a link to a URL where the source can be downloaded for free.
You could read 6(b) to mean that you have to offer consumers the choice between physical-delivery-at-cost and for-free-download of the source... but I don't think that's the right reading.
>I can't understand how you can let someone update part of the code on something compiled.
You can provide your closed source part as a precompiled library or object file together with the source code for the LGPL part and build scripts that let the recipient relink it with a (possibly modified version of) the LGPL code to generate a new final binary.
A pain yes but not impossible.
Having a screen or not is irrelevant, nothing says the recipient has to access the source on the same device as the binaries run.
IANAL, but I don't think that the part in the GPL about modification makes any requirement that you facilitate modifying compiled binaries. My understanding is that the requirement is essentially that distributing the binary requires you to distribute the source as well; if someone modifies that source code you provide and distributes a binary they compile from that modified code, they need to share the modifications as source as well.
This is also my understanding of why the AGPL was created to try to close the loophole of running GPL code on the backend; since running code on a server doesn't entail distributing the server binary to people who access the service, the GPL didn't enforce any requirements on sharing any modifications to code that was modified and used as part of the backend for the service. Some felt that this went against the spirit of the GPL, so a new license that made this also explicitly disallowed was created.
As for the LGPL, my recollection is that it differs from the GPL in creating an exception for dynamically linking to the compiled binary; the phrasing of the (non-L) GPL requires that any "derivative works" of the GPL-licensed product (I can't remember if that's the exact term, but it's a something similarly general) must abide by the GPL, which could be interpreted as applying to something that dynamically links to a library licensed under the GPL. Licensing something under the LGPL gives permission for users to dynamically link to your product without requiring them to share the code linking to it.
The point of the LGPL is that it allows static or dynamic linking with proprietary software, but it requires that users be able to modify the LGPL part and relink it with the proprietary part and have the result work, as long as the modified part is compatible with the proprietary part. With dynamic linking thats simple, just drop in a new LGPL library, but with static linking you have to share the .o files for the proprietary software to enable user relinking.
I think it is their stated aim at sfc to enforce compliance, not to sue. If they see you are not complying they will ask you to comply. Doesn't sound like something to be scared of?
It's only a bluff if we do nothing about it. Maybe the government doesn't have the enforcement spine for the job, but if they can make it clear who is in violation, well now we have a list of targets. We just need to create some incentives to not be on that list.
The article this thread is about was posted by Software Freedom Conservancy, who enforce copyleft licenses, for the Linux kernel and other projects. You can help fund their efforts with donations.
GPL for Linux is not a Bluff, it is a stated fact they (the Linux Foundation) will not enforce it. Publically stated, and supported by their corporate overlords... err "sponsors"
If you know, and followed the enactment of the "Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement " [1] [2] [3] which started out as an effort to stop a "rouge" developer from being a copyright toll, then further devolved with interactions with the core linux group and SFC based on a fundamental difference in the understanding of the GPL problem, and what GPL enforcement should be
SFC wants to use the law as a stick, while trying to get people to comply with out legal action. Many core members prefer to not even engage with the threat of legal action at all, they believe that simply asking nicely will get companies like VmWare to comply. of course this is rarely true but.....
I didn’t know about or follow any of that, so your links were helpful. Thanks!
After looking into this and reading your three links, I couldn’t find a conclusive answer to my follow up question, so maybe you know: did the Linux Foundation ever serve a legal purpose of pursuing copyright violations and take point in defending the copyright holders that contributed to the Linux Kernel?
Near as I can tell, it appears to be largely up to individual copyright holders.
Even that agreement seems to be an article of trust from individuals saying they’ll abide by the extra paragraphs and not doggedly pursue copyright violations so long as violators act in good faith about taking corrective action in a timely manner.
The "leadership" of Linux foundation, have been (and I am paraphrasing) quoted at various talks on the subjects in Q & A;s saying they can not conceive of a scenario for which they would choose legal action over attempting non-legal action (such as Public naming, PR campaign's etc). They simply reject using the legal system to enforce the license.
i am not aware of any legal action the Linux foundation, or anyone in the leadership of said has participated in, in a few instances, like the one that lead to the Enforcement Statement they have actively tried to kill the legal action.
The Enforcement Statement is vague purposefully as to what "good faith", and purposefully never spells out when it is OK to move to the courts... because in their view that answer is never
So in other words the Linux Foundation is not a litigious organization and therefore contributors must enforce their copyrights on their own to the extent that they are interested in them. I’m not intimately familiar with this organization but if they weren’t organized as a legal foundation to pursue copyright enforcement of Linux source code then it makes sense they’re never involved in lawsuits like this. It could very well just be outside its core purpose and well I guess that just makes sense since contribute retain the rights to their code and being a contributor doesn’t automatically establish an attorney-client relationship.
I managed to filter through all the SCO and most of the non-Linux lawsuit stuff gumming up Google and near as I can tell, the only lawsuits involving copyright violations are or Linux specifically are pursued by individuals or agencies like SFC.
So given all that I would read this enforcement statement as a PR move more than a definite article, less “this list of people is effectively giving up their copyright” and more “so you know that one jackass? Well this lot undersigned here won’t be like him. Please don’t stop supporting and using Linux.”
Just as an aside, what constitutes “good faith” is something that can and usually is regardless of whatever contract or license is in effect litigated in court.
what is the Software Freedom Conservancy? the wikipedia page just says anodyne things, but reading between the lines they seem to be a "we like the GPL but we dislike Stallman and GNU and FSF and Moglen"... am I reading into this correctly?
as a for-instance, in TFA it says this "issue that goes far beyond one person wanting to fix their printer software" which is a weird strawman-flex and seems more like a childish insult directed at Stallman's creative spark when he invented the software freedom movement in the first place 40ish years ago. Jelly much?
Honest question, why would they be divisive like this?
John Deere is a horrible company whose upper management needs to be wiped from the industry.