 So our first debate is should false licenses be enforced at all and we have Pamela Chastik, Giovanni Gaudes, Mark Jones and McCoy Smith and Who gets to go first? Giovanni, so we're still struggling with the projector, so you don't need it. Okay, so let me give you Yes, well, can I start? Yes Wow We're taking attendance first, okay, can we start? Are we good? Okay Shall we start? Okay. Well, good morning everyone. It seems that Every time I have to talk at first and something is going to happen Last last time I talked here. We went through three mics this time Just the the screen went out so I don't know whether it's my a coincidence or that's a problem with me But anyways, so I have to talk about enforcement and why enforcement is is good or what what are the main the main points and And What what where can I start? Well, where can I start? I can start maybe by Quoting some very famous quote by a well-known author Shakespeare Who says and it's very famous the first thing we do. Let's kill all the lawyers Well, some some of you may find it amusing, but on the other hand, it won't It won't it won't change the fact that controversies will happen and therefore If we want whether we want or not we need the enforcement That's that's the main point and first of all we have to define what we what we mean by enforcement Is enforcement litigation is enforcement only when you go to court only when you really Bring your cause to the tribunal or it's just Not a gentle nudge, but maybe asking for compliance asking politely and then asking Maybe with a louder voice is this enforcement? I think it is I think that's this enforcement and I think that this This vision is upheld also about wall But also by the principle of community oriented enforcement But also of the by the GPS the GPL cooperation commitment. This is another example It doesn't rule out enforcement It says that even if the scope is much is much less broad than the principle of community oriented Oriented sorry oriented enforcement for GPL compliance. Anyways enforcement is still a Possibility and also the linux kernel enforcement statement does not deny Enforcement not only because it is in the first in the name itself of the of the statement But also because it only describes that enforcement has to be made in Has to be defined in scope the scope of enforcement is not Personal gain the scope of the enforcement is not copyright trolling the scope of Enforcement it doesn't have to have a negative impact on the health and growth of software ecosystem I'm quoting from the linux kernel enforcement system. And so it is as I as I pointed out a necessary evil because Let's I do just let me do a personal example Yeah, under Italian law you may tell from my accent that I'm not be exactly British, but in when the code of The code of public of a digital administration came into force in Italy in 2006 it was a fantastic piece of legislation with fantastic principle digital Digital rise for the citizens, but there were there were no Consequences at all for any violation. So an old professor of mine told me, okay Yes, but this is very fun. But what happens if you violated it? Well, nothing Nothing, you cannot force the public administration. You don't have any cause of action And so guess what when the code of public administration Get some got some momentum when they introduce the consequences when they introduce a way to force P2 force public administration to comply with it So I'm not telling that we have to enforce every single violation Absolutely not. I'm not telling that we have to enforce even the most common or maybe just a Trivial violation and just I just have to tell that we cannot we cannot Deprive ourselves of the fact that we have to defend our freedoms also because Recent case of the European Court of Justice Stated that when you breach a license agreement you are in breach of copyright You are in breach you you are availed of the same remedies you have for copyright infringement and this Curiously enough is the same statement that was Was given by the court in the first GPL compliance case And so the VELTE versus site come of the Munich Tribunal of 2004 and so we have we really we really have a Powerful weapon, but as any powerful weapon We don't know we don't have to do it to use it in a futile way We don't know if as I said before we don't have to use In any case Compliance is a process and we already have some agreements which can be used for describing these This process and but it is very important to to do it and be prepared for litigation As well, which is a real complex topic so Enforcement is Not something that you have the communities to be scared because because we all also to the copyright Holders we owe to the community. We absolutely have to Make people understand that they have their eyes and their eyes can be can be protected also because No one Not not everyone is behaving correctly. There are of course some bad guys I would say I'm not going I won't go against people who violate the Copilot licensees just by mistake or by the fact that they misunderstood something but when the violation when the violation is when the violation is Really willful then we will go we will go and try to get compliance and also just to conclude We have to think that maybe some of the arguments against enforcement to go and Drive for a misconception Copyright is not as patent enforcing copyright is good copy left Yes Copyright we have to defend our eyes. Thank you Okay, so I think the format that we all agreed to was each of us is going to do a seven-minute presentation Which Giovanni volunteered to do first and then the people on the opposing side, which would be Pam and I Get to do cross-examination or rebuttal so you got to you got to continue to stand up there while I cross examine you But first you need to raise your right hand and say it after me So I got three minutes. I have two questions and the one is not really a rebuttal one sort of is When you're talking about enforcement you got any thoughts on whether that's a preferable Course to take Civil versus common law jurisdictions Since you're from a civil law jurisdiction, I don't know much about that. I'm a common law person Second isn't it true that the GPL cooperation? commitment by excluding certain forms Forms of enforcement is not being beneficial Doesn't that essentially concede that there are problems with enforcement? well First question Out of course, I will I will go for the civil law for a civil law litigation But I have to point to one one issue in several states This kind of infringement may also be criminal and I would never go for the criminal Prosecution so I would I would say this would not be a right way to enforce the second question Yes, you're totally right enforcement has problems, but you cannot rule out as the last resort That's that's the main point. You cannot say we won't enforce whatsoever You have to find a good way to benefit the community No further questions So I am taking the contrary view to Enforcement so first I would like to say that The definition of enforcement that I am working on means litigation. It means bringing lawsuits I'm not talking about politely asking people to provide source code or to comply with the license But taking an aggressive action of litigation against them So I'll start by saying Nelson Mandela said if you want to make peace with your enemy You have to work with your enemy then he becomes your partner So then he becomes your partner. That's the critical point here So free software has had wide adoption widespread adoption the various Sources that I have seen cited say between 50 percent and a hundred percent of all software distributed contains free software So if if we measure the success of software as use of it Then free software has been wildly successful However The success of this software is only because of the collaborative nature of the development model that's used for it So collaboration brings fresh ideas. It brings enthusiasm Enthusiasm when other people when other people have waned it brings new insight into old problems So we need to we need to have this continuous Contribution contributor feedback loop going But collaboration you can't have collaboration in an environment where there's not trust and suing people for non-compliance will break all trust and it will push away people instead of welcoming them into the community They may abandon all use of free software altogether was a result of it and they may switch to proprietary software This this a switch like that would be something that the legal department Would be advocate very strongly for legal departments are risk averse. This is a different world And they're not happy with it So to this and to this day as a result of the busy box losses, which were more than 10 years ago They still still strike fear into the heart of legal departments And as a result there are companies that are so mistrustful of open-source software that the prospect of and the prospect of getting sued that they Forbid the use of the GPL all together in their environments So once you've created that mistrust it is very hard to build that trust again It takes it'll take years to rebuild that and what you're losing during all that time is all of those contributions That could have been made by that by that entity that was sued So and I'll also point out here that it's only commercial companies that get sued We're not talking about individual developers here who are out of compliance who are being who are being targeted So you're talking about targeting a huge swath of developers companies that have a lot of people who may be contributors That are going to be barred from contributing and And from those companies who have the financial wherewithal to support the development effort of free software So this is this is how you impair the growth of the software commons. You're not feeding it. You're not fertilizing it You're impairing it And litigation then also has a ripple effect beyond just the beyond just this core project That was the target of the litigation beyond just the non-compliant company and beyond even just this one plaintiff who brought the lawsuit The community will lose value because of the potential contributions The the project will lose value because of these potential contributions by the sued party But not only that they may then not want to contribute to any other Software projects that they use The the project will lose potential users and contributors who might have joined Because of what the sued company brought to the table for that project its improvements and developments on the project and then Other even other members of the project may become so disenchanted By the the litigation and the lawsuit that they break ties with the project So you may lose developers as a result of this litigation And let's also just recognize that litigation is it's really It's really a copy left problem So Jacob seen big hats in the United States was was about the artistic license Which is not a copy left license But it was a claim but it was it was sort of an outlier because it was a patent infringement lawsuit that with this with this copyright claim tacked on But I've never heard of anyone complaining about non-compliance and certainly not even complaining about non-compliance much less suing on non-compliance with the MIT the BSD or the Apache licenses, so it's really just it's really just a copy left problem and then Then also keep in mind that we're talking here about cases where the recalcitrant Sharrer has been approached and advised of the non-compliance back to Giovanni's point that that it's not just you know We're suing people at the drop of a hat They have they have had they have been notified and they have time to come into compliance But for some reason they have chosen not to comply. This is a choice on their part They've chosen to fight and when they choose to fight It's going to be a long and expensive one and this is going to be time and energy spent on litigation that could be much better spent in other ways and it's also Likely just going to get some orphan bit of software a bit that is not may not end up being valuable to the larger project as a whole Because it's not been part of the development process all along Is it so is it really worth it? Is it really worth it to go through this expensive time-consuming litigation Just for maybe a loadable kernel module is that is it really worth the candle to do that? so And there's even now less reason to sue for compliance than there was during the busybox years Now there are more pressures to contribute to free software Software is replacing hardware. It's becoming much more critical. It's replacing hardware. It's replacing machines It's even replacing human acts in some cases human intellect in some cases And so mouth software malfunctions are no longer just an annoyance But everybody understands they're crucial that they are security issues in software Plains crash identities are stolen because of problems with software Companies that embed software into their hardware projects are also now quite savvy and they're asking for bill of materials from that from their supply chain They're no longer cavalier about the provenance and reliability of the software They now have come to understand that communal effort is the best way to go about Ensuring these problems don't arise and when they do arise that they are fixed quickly So market forces are driving compliance and litigation doesn't have to any longer So suing over compliance sends the opposite message of what we should be sending messages of inclusiveness I do no, I still have the mic this time is working. I won't I won't get rid of it I will keep it anyways two questions Yes First one, I like the way we lawyers play with words. I broaden the scope of and of enforcement while you tie to litigation, but If In this case So would you consider it? Fair to just ask for compliance or issue season disease letter Even if you don't call it enforcement, that's the first question and the second second question is you mentioned Hardware vendors. Do you think and you said that now they are Compliant and they are they are or they are mostly complying and they are also driven by the value of a community Do you think this would have happened the same? In the same way weren't it for the litigation case back in 10 years ago So to the first point on on how to define compliance No, I I don't think there's anything wrong with with pursuing people for compliance And I think there are a lot of good players out there who are trying to comply And if you bring an error to their attention, they will they will be happy to happy to correct that So that and that is why because because I I do think it's appropriate to ask people for sort copies of source code As to the sort of embedded and the upstream and much more awareness Did it happen? You know, it's hard to it's hard to it's hard to say what would have happened in the absence of history So the busy box lawsuits happened But do I think that they play a big role in why there's compliance now? No, I don't think so I think that what's happening is that manufacturers are being held responsible for The function of their products and when those products malfunction they They need to turn to their upstream and learn that they don't actually know what what what their distributor has provided them with They get a binary and so they they're it simply is business pressures That have caused them to become much more aware and much more cognizant and much and bring the hammer down much more in their distributors Or I'm sorry on there on their upstream manufacturers to make sure that they have it's in there It's in their own self-interest to have it. It's not because they need it's it's in there It's in there simply their liability self-interest not just that they need to provide the source code make the source code available But it's in there. It's just in their business interest to do it All right Bam, thank you for sharing your thoughts The the problem with the argument about not doing enforcement though is that that kind of presupposes that the community has a choice About whether or not enforcement is going to happen because the reality is is that enforcement happens This isn't a question of whether or not enforcement should happen. It's going to happen We see it happening all the time You can narrow enforcement down to a definition like oh, we're just talking about lawsuits and litigation That's fine, but those are actually going on And you don't need to be a member of the community to be involved in enforcement actions There are lawsuits that are going on right now between large corporations who are using free software They got into a commercial dispute and what those licenses mean are part of that dispute Pam mentioned that you know, this is that commercial actors part of what's happening is like well They need to be able to fix their products, so they're going to deal with upstream, right? Well, they have agreements with upstream They're going to enforce those agreements. That's part of enforcement if that relationship goes bad. There's going to be litigation And all of the activities that she was okay with are often very commonly called Pre-litigation activities the reason why those work is because there is the threat of litigation there So even if you want to narrow the definition of down to litigation It is not possible to say that you know You can just take that off the table and then all these other tools are going to be possible The fact that litigation is possible is what makes the other tools work And we're seeing this happen already, right? There are people out there doing enforcement We have trolls everyone in this room is probably aware of the Patrick McCarty cases, right? Like that happened We can't we can't tell people to not do that again all we can do is see what's happening on the courts and Decide how we're going to react to it one of those could be we could just sit by the side Right and let trolls define how this is going to play out in courts and let trolls define the playing field and hope that it doesn't work out for them That's one possibility, but the trolls are going to keep trying. They're going to keep looking for a way to use these licenses Companies are already doing this, right? You have two large insurance companies a couple years ago in the United States or a large insurance company in a software Manufacturing who didn't care about free software licenses They didn't even realize that free software licenses were involved until they got well into litigation They said oh, here's my commercial. Here's my advantage in this lawsuit now I'm going to turn this into an enforcement action Like it happens And then we had somebody who produced the software getting notified and they looked for the opportunity to profit off of it They didn't do that in a principled way They saw an opportunity to make money off of it and we don't know how that actually got settled But the fact that things got settled it probably was not for the promise That people are going to behave better, right? They didn't they did it in secret They didn't there was no there was no compliance coming out of any of the companies afterwards Somebody got paid for that like that is typically why you settle is you give me this a bunch of money here And I'll go away quietly right on the other hand there are some enforcement actions And there are some community actors who have principles around enforcement and what's wrong with setting up a system where we say We as a community that people actually believe in free software values people who believe in user freedoms are going to enforce these Licenses and if you don't listen to us there's going to be consequences But we are going to go about this in a principled way because we care about these values, right? So you have organizations like the free software foundation Software Freedom Conservancy who have come up with community principles. You have commercial actors like red hat who's leading You know GPL cooperation agreements on enforcement around the Linux kernel, right? These are principled ways of doing enforcement. It's not necessarily bad to do enforcement There might be good ways to do it and there might be bad ways to do it But just us as a community opting out means that we're going to only leave the space open for the people who are going to do It in the bad way or at least in the way that it's not principled that doesn't care about free software values It doesn't care about user freedoms So we can't hide underneath the rock on this one. This isn't a question of should we do it or should we not do it? Someone's going to do it. It's just a question of whether or not we give them the playing field there And really there's lots of benefits to litigation too, right? There are companies out there They're large commercial companies. They know what the goals of litigation is. It's to resolve a dispute Sometimes you need a third party to help you resolve a dispute. What's wrong with that? It doesn't actually mean that you hate the other person or you're scared of the other person or you'll never work with that person again Just means that you had a dispute and you couldn't resolve it and you need someone in to come explain How it's going to be viewed by a third party so litigation actually has lots of benefits, right? One of the benefits of litigation is is that instead of people who are involved in the community who have beliefs about how these Licenses should work who have beliefs about what the intentions of licenses should be We can learn from people who weren't involved in the community who weren't involved in drafting licenses What the words in the paper mean to others, right? There's an opportunity for us to learn, right? This is about this in some way as large degree is proofreading right when you go in front of a judge You ask them and say well, this is what I think the GPL means This is what I think the MIT license means do you agree because this is what I wanted this license to do And if the judge disagrees, well, you have a problem, right? It's it's not fair for you to go around saying well I intended this I intended this when other people reading licenses say but that's not what the license says All right, so we can change what we're looking for in those pre litigation activities What kind of compliance we're looking for on those licenses and we can write new licenses, right? We can write new licenses that will achieve the results that we actually want to happen and Litigation has happened in the past. I think Pam can see to this, right free software is being used more now than it ever has been And we've already had litigation on it, right? But in the early 2000s, we had some high-profile litigation cases the busybox cases were already mentioned However, you feel about those cases they happened and it didn't actually stop companies from adopting free software, right? In the early 2000s when those cases were being brought and enforced and other ones to gpl violations or we had large commercial act There's they're saying calling these licenses virals in cancers Those companies aren't doing that anymore, right? We also had litigation out there Where was the question was were these licenses even enforceable, right? Well, we had litigation that was resolved everybody Come every company knows they're enforceable now so in conclusion We don't have a choice Companies aren't scared of it. We know that So we might as well do it in a principled way so we can get the benefits of it So let me start by saying I'm in a disadvantage here because Mark and I argued on the same side of this a year ago at copy left But let me so so let me let me challenge some of the things you've said With respect so one of one of the pressures that is on that creates compliance is people Yes, certainly sorry one of the one of the one of the things that Encourages compliance is that people like to abide by their contracts So simply behavior of a but people don't go around intentionally They do intentionally breach contracts, but they tend not to people tend to stick to their contracts So just the fact that there is an agreement to people. It's not just the litigation It's not just the threat of litigation It's not just the threat of a breach that makes you not breach a contract It is you as an upstanding person will abide by your obligations under a contract So it's not just litigation that that that is that sort of sword one other There you've also ignored that there is a vehicle for these other lawsuits that are bought brought by the emeritus of the world Which is the opportunity to participate as an as an amicus brief to come in and step and educate the court on these matters So it may not be necessary for the free software community to bring the lawsuits but simple that they can participate to inform and educate the court on the issues of amicus through the vehicle of amicus briefs and Totally forget what my third point was Well, it was whatever your last point was it was hard to keep in my head as I was I was doing this seven minutes is a long time Well, whatever your third point was I think whatever I said has already rebutted it To your first point though that people like to abide by their contracts, I think some people do There are definitely some people in the world who view Relationships with people that they have three moves like they keep their word and the contracts reflect that But there are also people whose business model is to try to get every single edge And they will go about breaching contracts if they think they can get away with it But at the end of the day, we're also talking about contracts, you know legally enforceable agreements and I mean Around the world can anyone have an idea how many lawsuits are initiated every day for breach of contract part of What makes contracts meaningful is that people know that they're enforceable There's a big difference between saying well, I will promise that I will do this And I'm just gonna say that to you over the phone and writing down in a piece of paper So it's objectively visible to someone else who can come in with enforcement power and actually ask you to do it So that it's part of this actually I have my third thought that I just we're running the clock is running So I just don't can I can I see a show of hands of someone who has been sued and has warm and fuzzy Feelings toward the entity that sued them Oh, we got one that we have one person's that was my final point was you said oh, it's just business It's just business. I think that's an easy I think that's an easy out to say it's a business But I have never worked at a company that that was subject to a lawsuit that didn't just have hateful thoughts towards the Towards the other party Yeah So I'm the second negative here on enforcement And I'm gonna one up Giovanni and Pam by having two quotes And debaters trick the first is from a Supreme Court Justice in the United States About a hundred years ago. He said the life of the law Has not been logic. It is experienced The second is if it ain't broke don't fix it And I'll explain both of those in a little bit of detail here So the life of the law is not logic. It has been experience. You can interpret that a lot of different ways, but To me one way of to interpret that is we should not think of the legal system as Something that's a logical system Where we can select the inputs? It will go through a systematic Process of analysis that's predictable and that will get us a result that we like in fact It's quite contrary to that Ideally it would be logical like that, but it does not work that way in practice More often than not or I would she would say somewhat frequently I'll give you two examples of this From the free and open-source software licensing world or actually three examples. The first is a Jacobson v. Katzer Which Pam talked a little bit about and I think most of us has probably heard about that and Remember that well That's one of the first cases if not the first case that validated the free and open-source licensing model in a court decision and Said that the authors have the ability to pursue some For violation of the terms of the license What a lot of people may not remember Although is those of us who have been doing this for a while do remember is that that case was really messed up for a long time The input into the system was not good in other words the two parties that were disputing in that case We're not optimal Their representatives perhaps may not have been advocating positions that we thought would have been good to get the result that we wanted And in the at least in the district court. We got a decision that was Contrary what I think most people would prefer to have an interpretation of how free and open-source software licensing works It was through the efforts of a lot of people Putting themselves in front of that litigation and lending assistance To the parties that we did get an appeals court decision That is now useful to all of us in understanding the licenses that we use so that is a first example of a Suboptimal system processing that could have gone the wrong way but for Some advantageous actions that were taken and in the end a court that Saw things the way that we think they should be seen by the way the court that saw it that way it's the exact same court that decided that Oracle should win with Google so You take what you get from these courts sometimes they find things the way that you like a Lot of times they find things the way that you don't like that's part of the system Two other examples a little bit more recent From outside the United States so McCarty versus Genia Tech in Germany and Helvig versus VMware in Germany now I don't know if anybody's read about these cases either the decisions or the write-ups of them There's a good write-up in jolts the journal that everybody knows I promote Regularly every time I open my mouth there's a good article on the Jenny a Keck tech case in jolts from about a year ago Describing how that went down There has not yet been an article if somebody's willing to write one on the VMware case we'd be interested in publishing it but the bottom line of those cases is the courts found What appear or set what appear to be fairly difficult to? meet standards of proof for Whether you had copyright rights That you could assert against somebody that you believe to be an infringer That is something I think that is problematic For people who want to think about enforcement if the tests are hard Enforcement gets hard and worse if the output from the court is Detrimental there's a negative feedback loop there The next court takes a look at that and says well the test is hard We should make this hard for people who come into the court and want to enforce That's why when you go to the system of enforcement through litigation you are taking a risk That the inputs will be bad the system processing will not be predictable the outputs will be Unfortunate and there may be a negative feedback loop that makes things worse so Litigation has Or enforcement has its downsides. We need to consider that and we need to consider that Cases in the future May come to conclusions about the licenses that we like That may be Detrimental to the way that we want the community of developers to work I'm not going to steal vans thunder But the Google versus Oracle case is another example Where we need to watch that case carefully because it may indeed have some Disadvantages effects on the way people are thinking about how these licenses work So I'll leave that at that now If if it ain't broke don't fix it We've got a big group of people in this room I think most of the people here probably owe their jobs to non enforcement Modes of compliance And I think we should continue to have people encouraged to work in that way Okay, so now you get to cross examine me I get to cross examine. All right, so I think we're going with two questions or at least two questions that we can remember I had three but I actually forgot my third one as well, so All right, so my first question is so J compete the cat sir So you said that that could have been a disaster Until a lot of people engaged and then we've got a positive result Isn't that an argument for an engaging in enforcement because we got a positive results When the people who cared about these licenses showed up to help educate the courts about how the licenses work And then my second question is going to be You said as long as the system works in the way that you want it to that's the right result Don't assume that the system will always work that way. That's my cautionary well, so this goes to my second question then is you Kind of implied that we shouldn't do enforcement because sometimes we might get negative results and right now We're getting what we want Because there's still the threat of enforcement, but we might if we do too much enforcement We might suddenly find out there is no Threat of enforcement would we still what get what we want if we take enforcement off the table? What so I'm gonna I'm gonna echo what Pam said, which is I'm not sure that we can say For certain that enforcement in the past has resulted in the compliance in the present Nevertheless, I think that The way that's most consistent with the way the free software and free and open-source software Movement works is to go to conferences setups compliance programs talk train Develop systems internal systems Develop tools in a way so that everybody can benefit and that everybody can run their operations in a way that is Compliant and is consistent with the Phil's Phil philosophy of the movement I would advocate and I hope all most of you who owe your jobs that would also advocate that that's the best way to get things done Okay, so we have Arrest my case. Okay. Now we have We have I think we have ten minutes for questions Now we Combined the two questions Yes, we should yes, yes So it was very interesting hearing the positions about whether or not enforcement of licenses required I'm curious to know if you collectively would agree that licenses themselves are Required not necessarily like not not considering enforcement just the licenses Well in an ideal world licenses would not be required everybody would operate in a Community appropriate way I would say that a license and I think this is the free software foundation has said this the license is the Constitution of the movement, so it's one way of Outlining expectations for everybody who's operating in the space whether or not you actually actuate that as a legal document versus a Set of principles, you know that goes into disenforcement question I think licenses are required And one that just happens to be had the legal regime that we work under works If you don't have a license to use someone else's copyrighted work, you're not allowed to use it However, you articulate what that license is whether it's through, you know a Passive acquiescence to someone's use or a casual conversation or a written document Licenses technically have to be granted the advantage of written licenses, which might be going more to your question Is it it adds clarity and certainty it can be objective and it reduces Misunderstandings and I think it does go to McCoy's point of right these licenses in many respects do operate as Kind of a constitution for projects or for the movement But if they're not clear We need a way of bringing about clarity about it and not everybody is going to always agree And you just need to find a way of getting to clarity about what the relationship is I Yeah, I would agree with that with sort of the only other only thing to say in addition to that is that then if there were not written licenses then the Troll problem would be much much broader. So we see this happening all the time and in Collaborative communities that work with unwritten rules is all of a sudden there's a shift and Someone doesn't follow the unwritten rules and and creates a lot of disruption So the license acts as those written rules so that everybody has a common understanding of what's acceptable behavior Yeah, I Just want to point out that if you don't write any rules or so if you don't have licenses lawyers will benefit greatly because because we will we will have a total incentive and And Coming on may correspond if the license is our constitution then we have to fight for it So my question is especially for those who oppose enforcement Does the time ever get better to do to do enforcement? Can we say? Maybe in 20 years Some terms will be clearer in the industry So the courts will more easily get the right output from a certain input for instance Or or is the decision? Let's say forever. So we will not do it even in a cent or from now So I think in your example actually would be run counter to enforcement if there were a court out there that the The world court were to say here is how GPL works For every provision in it Everybody knows the rules There's no reason why anybody wouldn't follow that so I think in that case It's less likely to be the subject of enforcement. The ambiguity tends to Allow people to Raise questions about what the licenses mean So I you know whether 20 years from now to enforce them will be good or not good I don't know that's that's hard to predict. It really depends on a lot of different circumstances, but I'm not so sure that more court decisions will I Think more clarity in court decisions will Put the roadmap out for everybody on how they need to operate So this is a two-parter the first is do you believe that proprietary licenses are There is a culture of the expectation of enforcement of proprietary licenses and Number two if you agree with that Why do you believe? Free and open source licenses should be any different That's for that's for that's for all actually Start with the I Think there probably is an expectation that propriety licenses will be enforced More readily than free software licenses I suspect it's probably because we just think companies are willing to be more litigious and free software is made by Individuals who are less sophisticated when it comes to litigation and commercial dealings Which I don't think is actually it's that just not true right like free software is produced by large companies that are very sophisticated So that expectation might be out there at the same time, too I also think that the expectation that proprietary licenses will be enforced. They're not enforced quickly It's not like everyone who bought proprietary software got sued by the manufacturer Nor is it true that they were all in compliance I think the fact that there's that expectation of differences is a Problem and to a disadvantage of the community though right is that somehow the community should be Above doing litigation, but it's okay for companies to do it on their proprietary licenses Why should we give the proprietary license manufacturer is that advantage? I? Actually Disagree with the premise that there's more enforcement going on in proprietary licenses I think yeah McCoy's nodding his head I think that that the the companies that are doing enforcement work on copyright licenses the very last thing They want to do is to a customer and they will only do it if it's already a lost cause if it's already a cause And there's a lot of money involved that can be recouped, but if Well, yeah Yeah, and there but but really you know They would much rather have a paying customer who's paying a bit more because they've convinced them that they're non-compliance Really means they should be coughing up a little more money than they are now But they much rather keep that keep that customer and and write off the loss rather than lose the customer entirely and lose all Income from that customer. So so I kind of I don't think that proprietary companies have a culture of enforcement I think it is just the opposite Thanks for all that Do you think that enforcement and litigation as you narrow it down does it Is it working on license by license case? So if in the future that we said that maybe in 20 years time some court has already Defined all the points of GPL But maybe then we should all have moved to another license which is still ambiguous by then Or do you think that results of? Enforcement and litigations apply to everything is that for one side one particular side of the other take that so Litigations over let's say GPL to may have an effect on future licenses GPL v4 or whatever Because in many cases these these litigations the the courts are setting out general principles Not necessarily Limiting the decision to the exact text That's why Oracle v. Google is an important case to Things other than Java and that's why people care about it right because they anticipate the people who are arguing about it Are anticipate that it's going to set the rules for how we interpret What's copyrightable in software? Generically, so I think that answers your question Okay We have time for more responses Just a very just a very very quick comment on this I mean Every decision may have an impact on future licenses and of course it depends on the license being litigated Theoretically you could enforce also a bill where license, but I don't think that Enforcing a bill where license may may have an impact on food from future licensing Okay, so I know but I don't think we have time for because there's one okay So what we need to do is for your debaters Raise your hand if you mostly agree with the position that you took in the debate Raise your hand if you don't want to if you don't want to raise your head You don't want to say whether you do or you don't doesn't matter. You know what you all did an excellent job So what we're doing? Yeah, we will okay now We are not having we are not having formal judging of these debates However, what I want to know is so we'd stay up here Okay, so what I want to know is for the people against enforcement Raise your hand if They brought up something you hadn't thought about before Okay, and those for enforcement raise your hand if they brought up something you hadn't thought about before Okay Now raise your mind raise your hand raise your mind raise your hand if You changed your mind due to something that was said By anyone on this debate have you changed your mind based on this debate at all So like quite a few people. Yeah, anyway, so let's give let's give these debaters another first one's doing it