 GPL enforcement or GPL compliance, with the experience of doing that for 25 years. And I'm really, really happy to introduce you, Bradley Kuhn, who is one of the very few, if not the only person on this planet who has this experience of doing this GPL work for 25 years. So I'm all thrilled to listen to what he has to say. Give him a very warm welcome, Bradley Kuhn, please. So I think the most important thing to remember about my talk is not what I'm going to say, but how important this event is. This event is run by a community of volunteers. It is the most important free software event in the world every year. It has the most attendees and it is non-commercial, community-oriented and fair and friendly. And there are only three or four events like that left in our community because they've been taken over by other interests. And this is by far the largest. So that's the most important thing I have to say. You can all leave now. My slides are online. Anything that's in blue is a link. So feel free to follow along and when you get bored, just click through the links and read those instead. I've done a lot of talks about copy left. As most of you probably know, I see people out there who have seen a lot of them. I work for an organization called the Software Freedom Conservancy. We do a lot of different things. We spend a lot of different time on things that are not licensed enforcement or anything to do with licenses. My colleagues stayed up to 4 a.m. this time zone to get a bunch of logistics done for a conference for one of our projects last night while I was working on this talk. I spent some of the afternoon working on this talk, but also importing our donation system and fixing it. But people always want to hear about copy left, so I tend to talk about that more than any other topic that we do. I suppose you don't want to hear about how our PayPal Perl script works. Yes, it's written in Perl. I'm sorry. So I think, most importantly, free software developers need to know the whole story of what's going on. There are a lot of things happening in the politics of copy left. My colleague, Karen Sandler, who I work with, keeps telling me not to use the word politics, but there are lots of politics. So I'm not the type of person that's going to cover up what things really are. And most of you don't know what is going on with those politics. Fortunately, because I work for a charity, not a company, not a trade association, I have a tremendous amount of freedom. It's the best job I've ever had. I hope to retire from it someday. And I have not only the freedom, but an obligation as an employee of a charity to really tell you what the real story is, at least from our point of view. In fact, Conservancy, I think, is even more transparent than most charities. And we operate, I think, as the most transparent organization in the open source and free software community by far. Those of you who have seen my talks before know that I like to put stuff about philosophers up on my slides. I like first principles. I like the idea of applying the humanities to this world of science. Interdisciplinary thought is important. I'm capable of laughing at it as well. But I really cared about ideas and morality and right and wrong and doing good in the world. So I want to start out by giving the brief tale of how I ended up caring so much about copy left. I went to what we call in the U.S. a liberal arts university. I was primarily studying computer science, but we had excessive requirements, some thought, in going to philosophy and literature courses. But I was a geek, of course, and I had never owned my own computer. I know that sounds bizarre to the younger people in the audience, but until I got to college, I'd never owned my computer and my own computer, so I wanted to buy one. So I bought something that looked a lot like this. I actually got it from Sager. I could not find any picture of 1992-era Sager laptop, so this is I think it's a Shiba model, but it looked a lot like that. I couldn't find any personal pictures of it. Well, apparently I didn't take photos of my computer like I do with my dogs now. So there's not any photos of that computer, I don't think. But I got it and it was well known around campus. One of my literature professors whom I liked, I went back to see him in the early 2000s. I had him for three classes. I didn't expect him to remember me. He said, of course I remember you. You were the first person to ever bring a laptop to one of my classes. Now they all bring those things. And now I got it this way. I didn't have internet access. You used to buy this magazine. It was called The Computer Shopper. It was giant. It was this thick. It was like $6.50, which was a pretty expensive magazine in 1992. And you'd page through it and you look at all the computers for sale. And you'd use this thing called a telephone. And I'm not talking about that device you have in your pocket now. This was a thing connected to a twisted pair line to a central office, that sort of stuff. And you'd call them up and you'd order a computer and they'd send it to you. Now, I had already been using Unix. I had access to a Unix system at work. Unfortunately at that point I only had access to a VMS system at school. But I knew Unix was the best operating system available. And I needed to find one for my little Sega laptop there. Well, I just wasn't so little. It was like 35 pounds. I don't know how much that is in kilos. It was heavy. That's why I think every laptop I had is like, I'm free-rolling. Because every laptop I've ever had is lighter than that one ever since then. So I carried around 35 pounds around campus. What's the big deal? So I started reading this news group. Because I had use net access but I didn't have access. So I was reading CompOS Minix and read this, well, in what use net was called Real Time. It was a few days after it was posted because it took that long for the message to get to you. But a few days after it was posted I read it. Because I was reading CompOS Minix to see if I could get Minix running on that Sega PC and then found out that, hey, this Linux thing might be coming along when I get my Sega PC. I can install this Linux thing. And one of the things that was very interesting to me was that word. That's still very interesting to me. Because for me, software was going to be a profession but it was also going to be a hobby. It had already been a hobby for many years. And I like this idea of writing something as a hobby. Because hobbyists were people who bought this thing every month. Hobbyists were people who would buy a device like that and carry it around to campus. It was heavy. I had two batteries for it too because you need to switch batteries in the middle of a 45-minute class because you ran out. And the great thing that when I downloaded the 30 Floppies of SLS, Slackware didn't exist yet when I installed Linux for the first time, I actually was able to patch Linux. I was able to change things. I changed Linux. I should have submitted them upstream. I'd actually be a copyright holder now and they wouldn't be able to accuse me of not being a copyright holder. But I never submitted my patches upstream. By the way, one of the patches I made, did you know that there was no, you fight over a NIT and system D, but there was no a NIT system in the early Linux? When you hit Control-Alt-Delete, it literally called halt in the source code. I commented that out so in case I hit Control-Alt-Delete, I didn't want the computer to halt. So I got patched, right? So I discovered CopyLeft because of this. I started using free software and started using Emacs as well and saw a copy of the GPO. Now, this definition of CopyLeft didn't exist at the time when I discovered it, but it's a really good definition. So you have the benefit of the years of people honing this definition, which originally comes from Wikipedia and now is on copyleft.org. But the most important word I want to draw to your attention is strategy. Copyleft is not a principle. It's a strategy. It's not a moral imperative, as Kant might say. It is a method to achieve an important moral imperative. That's the moral imperative from my point of view. Making sure that every individual who has software on their computer has the right to copy, modify, distribute and install those modifications on their laptop or whatever hardware they have and share them with other people. That's, in my view, something that should be an inalienable right. I think it should be in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, in fact. Copyleft, on the other hand, is not a principle like that is. It is a strategy that we invented, particularly Stalman invented, to help us get there to that moral imperative, help us reach that goal. So, since it's only a strategy, it's not a principle. You can throw away strategies and make up new ones. You should be very careful about throwing my principles, particularly first principles, but we can ask the question of copyleft is working at all. People keep asking me that over and over again, in fact, so I find myself answering it very often. I'm pretty sure the only way we can answer it requires us to have access to multiple parallel universes, one of which all the free software was copy-lefted and all the software in the other universe was non-copylefted. If we could look at those two parallel universes, we could figure out what the better strategy was. But even if this, you know, the many worlds of quantum states, whatever that is, is true. I only know it from science fiction. I didn't take any physics. I was taking literature and philosophy. I think we can't analyze the parallel universes. So we have to look at what we have, what's happened in the past and what seems to be happening now. And as we do that, there are two things that are happening more and more these days. It's reached, I think, in our entire political culture, not just the free software one, quite a crescendo in recent years, months and weeks and days. There's a lot of truthiness. I love this word. It was a word invented by a U.S. comedian named Stephen Colbert. And the word basically means something that has no evidence of whether it's true or not, but it sounds as if it's true. It has the quality of possibly being true and therefore is easily believed when expressed over and over again. It's what Noam Chomsky calls concision, this idea that if you can state an idea briefly, it's fitting with ideas people already have. You're more likely to convince them over to your argument because you're basically just reinforcing their confirmation bias. Whereas if you want to explain something complicated that might have a lot of ins, a lot of outs, you need more time. What also happens is there's a lot of revisionist history happening with regard to copy left. Here's an interesting example. David Woodhouse, who is a Linux developer, he's part of our coalition who enforced the GPL with us, asked this question of Greg K.H. And Greg said that he does want to see compliance with the GPL. I think Greg and I have always agreed about that. But he thinks suing any violator is the wrong answer because we've been so successful without ever suing anybody. That's a bit of revisionist history. We've been enforcing the GPL for a very long time and not just on Busybox, probably what I'm better known for being related with. It's been on Linux since the advent of the embedded system. This thing came out. It ran Linux. It had no source code offer. The source code was not available. And in the spring of 2003, a coalition of developers, whom I helped, particularly I helped Eric Anderson, but also involved with Howard Belta, we all did a GPL enforcement action that took about 10 to 12 months to accomplish. At the end of it, we not only got source code, we created a free software community. If you go back, if you find the old SV entry of OpenWRT, you will see the first check-in. It matches almost byte-for-byte what we were able to achieve from Cisco and Linksys as the compliant source release for that device. That community is still vibrant today. Admittedly, it has a fork at the moment. But both sides of the fork show this action, this specific enforcement action for all their history. I don't know how much code got upstreamed from OpenWRT. There's a lot of upstream crossover now. But I don't expect that revision one had tons of upstreamable code. But it was incredibly important. Not just for every WRT-54G owner, but for everyone who has ever installed an alternative firmware on the router ever in their life. They owe it in some part to this GPL enforcement action. Now, Rob Landley, who I worked with quite a bit on GPL enforcement for a while, he's against GPL enforcement now quite publicly. He's recently publicly said that he used some of the funds he got from GPL enforcement to fund a non-copy-left-replacement divisi-box. I think that's great, actually. To write more free software, whatever license it's under. But his main complaint was that in all the enforcement he and I did together, I never gave him a single upstream patch to busybox, which is true. And I had the good opportunity to see Rob at Linux Conf Australia just last week. And we settled this issue. And I think we now understand each other. I never thought that upstreaming code was the top priority because I don't think it is the top priority of the GPL. The top priority of the GPL and its primary goal is to make sure downstream users who wish to be developers, either knowing it or not, i.e. they're going to serendipitously become a developer or they already want to be, have the code to the device in their hands and can make actual real use of that source code to build a new binary. And then, over time, even with OpenWRT and now the lead project also become upstream developers. So it's not a immediacy of getting upstream code. It's about developing and building a community of upstream and downstream who slowly and work well together over time and expand because of the code promagating under copy left. That's why GPLv2, common misconception, people think this kind of language is only in v3. It's right there in v2. Compilation and installation matter. They really, really matter. They mattered when I had my PC when this was the standard version of GPL and it matters even more now. In the same conversation this is what Matthew Garrett had to say about it. He put it better than I did, I think. This is what it's really about. It was certainly what it was about for me. Certainly I had that thing at 19 and I was doing what Matthew's talking about here. Now the kids today as we old people say won't have one of these but they're going to have this and it's going to be running Linux and they probably won't right now have the source code for it and they'll have one of these. They probably already do. They probably don't have the source code for it and now the refrigerator is going to have Linux. We used to talk back in those complex Linux days that eventually your toaster will run Linux. It was a joke then but it's not so much of a joke now. The refrigerator is one step away now from toasters. And this thing, now I like TV, most people in our community don't like TV shows so much but some of us do and your TV is probably running Linux if you have one. In fact, this is the first device that a lot of people are going to interact with. This one and that one are the first two devices they're going to see in their lives most of the time these days and if they're running Linux they might actually become a developer but if they're running Linux and it's violating the GPL which is the case right now they won't have the opportunity to become a Linux developer because they're going to shut down. And we need enforcement to make sure that they can. Conservancy has fought exactly one busy box lawsuit against a number of defendants one of whom was Samsung and in fact Samsung was violating the GPL came into compliance which is very good of them to do and it spawned yet another community like the open RAT community, not as big not as many people have Samsung TVs but a vibrant community of people developing an alternative firmware for Samsung TVs you can actually run your own DVR on an SD card on a Samsung TV using Samigo that's the kind of innovation that happens when you have software freedom now long ago when this all started there wasn't tons of different markets tons of different products running Linux there were wireless routers and there was a guy I just mentioned Harold Velta Harold he was really angry at me that I didn't push to sue Linksys and Cisco right away and from 2004 to 2013 he went off and did his own enforcement because he thought the enforcement that Eric and I were doing on busy box was not good enough and that more lawsuits needed to be filed and he filed a lot of them over the years this is of course the timeline when Linux was rising lawsuit after lawsuit as Linux rises to be in every device in the world so when people say that we've done so well without ever suing anyone with Linux we didn't live in that particular quantum reality I didn't anyway maybe I've crossed like Worf did in that episode and you all remember a different history than I do I don't know but as far as I know we didn't I think in fact the GPL is a reason that Linux was successful and the reason it was more successful than the BSDs and its enforcement was part of that I think it's fun to say that we don't need GPL enforcement because if lawsuits and GPL enforcement endanger Linux they've been endangering it since 2002 so if this is the world that endangered Linux makes I think it's okay not so bad we have Linux in lots of lots of lots of devices but meanwhile the clients is more and more rare most devices on the market are violating the GPL I used to keep count I just have a giant email folder of all the ones people have emailed to the conservancy I couldn't even count them anymore I made a about I guess eight, nine years ago I made a bet with the world that I could find a GPL violation per day, for a year I did that of course I got boring after like day like 80 or 90 but I did it and what's even bigger now is I'm talking a lot about Linux because that's sort of where the the political pressure and the political fight is happening but it's not just about busybox and Linux there's Samba in these devices, there's FFMpeg and whole bunches of other GPL software that people put the GPL on because they wanted software freedom for their users and they're not getting it and it's not just about Linux now we talk a lot about Linux about the GPL but I think for the obvious reason because it's a kernel which means the center of something so it's the center of the operating system so it's the kernel, it's GPL so it's obviously going to be the one that we talk about first and it's in all these devices and it's violating in all those devices and plenty more as well How about this kind of my hero I told him recently that I should have listened to him back in 2004 he was absolutely right and it's unfortunate that he's gotten busy with other things which are really great projects but he's not available to do enforcement at the moment he wanted to get started again but has not been able to find the time so for the moment with regard to Linux at least and Samba as well Conservancy is the only organization doing community-oriented enforcement What do I mean by community-oriented enforcement we have a list of principles these are not first principles these are sort of the principles that fall out from the first principle because if your goal is to get software freedom for users there are certain ways that you have to do GPL enforcement to make sure that you're doing it in a principled way that feeds into that first principle now these are principles that I've followed for many many years myself but I'd never written them down so when Karen started working we actually write them down and we actually codify them in a formal way and make a public process to allow people to comment now people have not joined our public process they sort of are complaining off to the side and I hope they will join and talk about our principles but I think they're pretty good and the one that is most pertinent to the current political debate is this one because we've always said that lawsuits are really bad if you have to get to them and we've avoided and avoided and avoided lawsuits in every case where we've had to file one and because of that the fact of the matter is Greg and I agree on almost everything about GPL compliance and enforcement there's a tiny tiny place where we don't agree very very tiny and it's on I think a relatively minor point and this is how it goes I asked Greg who's been violating for 10 years they're completely savvy they understand completely what their violation is in fact you've figured out that they had planned from the start to violate the GPL and try to get away with it and they've told you to the face there's no way they're ever going to comply and just go away I asked Greg what should I do in that situation he said you should walk away so what that means is the worst of the worst of wireless routers people who actually try to make sneaky little proprietary kernel modules that do weird network stuff are the ones who will get away with violations and the tablets that try to have proprietary video and all sorts of other device drivers and Linux that are not free will get away with it because they're the ones that are going to stand firm and say find Sue us and that TV when somebody writes a DRM module for Linux and has to make a proprietary so the DRM actually works they'll get away with it because they're going to say if you want us to sue us if you want us to liberate that code so the worst in that strategy the worst of the worst violators the ones who really really planned to hurt the free software community get away with it and the ones who just made mistakes actually come into compliance it seems a little backwards to me the fact of the matter is it's companies who are most upset that there have been lawsuits about the GPL it's company representatives hanging destabilizing our industry but they have destabilized their industry pretty well already there are hundreds of lawsuits every year between various tech companies all the time there's this service called Pacer it's actually free for your first 10 services if you want to search the US legal system you can search for companies and see wow there's all these lawsuits between them I never heard about I tried to count earlier today I went through every single lawsuit I could think of and I counted many of them twice I called that 15 even though it was only one because there was 15 defendants if you count in the maximum possible way I couldn't get past the mid 40s and that's in the entire history of GPL enforcement at least in the quantum reality I'm living in so how is it that companies can be so angry at us that we filed 50 lawsuits when they filed thousands against each other they continually politically attack us even companies that have counter sued for GPL themselves come back and attack us at GPL and specifically they're really really angry about Kristoff's case and in that case we're funding Kristoff to do what's right about his code on code he holds copyright on the funny part is it's not just that side that's angry at me and Karen for doing enforcement our friends are mad at us too because of this one this principle they don't like this year at renewal time for conservancy supporters who don't always wrote to us and they said pretty much the same thing well you're just not being aggressive enough you should be getting so much money out of these companies that you're funding a giant operation to enforce and get everybody in the compliance everybody has the source code they deserve and you're just not doing it right you should be making them pay through the nose so you can roll the money forward and keep enforcing and keep enforcing now we did a little bit of that we got those defendants in that busy box lawsuit into compliance and read very very transparent you can see exactly how much money conservancy took in from those lawsuits and we did use some of that money to fund future GPL enforcement but we've been doing this Linux enforcement for five years and I'm slightly ashamed to say in all the Linux enforcement I've done I have not gotten a single company into compliance yet we have matters open that I opened the day we got the first people signing up for our coalitions we're still open today Karen there's two emails you have to send on those but yeah I mean we're still working on those matters Karen and I after five years and the reason is proprietary kernel modules they come into compliance on all the easy stuff they're like oh yeah we fix our build system and now you can build the software and everything and we say that.co file is a combined work with Linux you have to give us the source code to that they say well let's talk about other issues we're fixing let's talk about those for a little bit longer we talk about we dutifully say well we'll talk about those we'll put that aside we'll talk about that last finally we get to that being the only issue and they don't come into compliance now if we wanted to do what our allies are asking us to be more aggressive I don't think we can in that scenario because of this principle this principle is the most important one to me I think it is complete corruption we take a dime from a company who is still out of compliance because basically you're at that point being paid off to look the other way so I will not work for conservancy I will resign the day we take a dime from a company that's in an active violation but that also means I have to do this which I hate doing but if we're going to go this way and we're going to say let's never be corrupt let's never take money from anybody in active violation then we have to ask you to donate as was mentioned in the last talk in this room there is a supporter match running if you sign up as a supporter for conservancy the donation will be matched by an anonymous donor for the next week so I hope you will do it I also want to tell you that we don't like this work it's not like I'm enjoying it my political opponents who have attacked me and attacked Karen as well have kept saying that somehow we're trying to make our careers out of this you don't make your careers out of something that's boring in fact at least my career is screwed I can work two places for the rest of my life at 12 for freedom of conservancy or I can go back and work for the FSF I guess I could go be we're going to coffee shop or something but that's it because no one will hire me so why would I do that to myself for any reason other than because I care about this community and I want to do good things for it there's no other reason I wouldn't bother I'd love to be a developer again I used to be a software developer I used to be a sysadmin I guess I would be antiquated because I don't say devops I still say sysadmin but whatever I would love to do that work again but this is too important and there's so few people doing it it's what Harold did Harold is a software developer and he said enforcement is boring and annoying and I care about it but I want to write new free software for the world and he's writing some great new free software he's written an entire GSM stack that's completely free software it's really amazing but he doesn't want to do GPM enforcement so it leaves people like me and Karen to pick up the slack I was asked in my pre-fosdmin interview which you can read online the conference organizers this wasn't really a question they just sort of stated it but I took it as a question I answered that it's absolutely I agree with this completely I want every developer in this room to know I want to live in a world where you would know if I put the GPL in my code if I'm editing code that's under the general public license or any of the similar licenses like the afero GPL or LGPO that my software is forever free I want that to be true but again I don't live in that quantum reality copy left is not magic pixie dust we don't sprinkle it on code and clap our hands and suddenly it flies that's not how it works it's difficult to keep copy left working there's a back-end process that you have to do and someone has to take care of that for Linux I care a great deal about both GPL and Linux so it's strange that Karen and I have been accused of caring more about one than the other our credits have said well you care about copy left you don't care what happens to Linux it's as if they're saying we're going to sacrifice Linux at the altar of the great GPL as if GPL were a principle not a strategy the thing is is Linux and GPL both are not as important as people think they are and I'm probably going to get that's going to be the little soundbite that my political opponents quote but it's true and I will say the truth what matters about Linux is it's a community of people developing software it's a community that has some bugs that need to be fixed that's much more important than anything else in some ways about how they treat each other and so forth on the mailing list but the key thing I think is valuable about Linux is that it's GPL then gets to the next generation in these devices who pick it up start hacking on it and then join that community and the community grows that's the world that I wanted to live in that's the world that excited me when I got that laptop in 1992 and that's the world I want to preserve really code and licenses both are ephemeral maybe I'm too much of an academically trained computer scientist but my professors always said the code doesn't matter the idea behind it the ability to express computation is what matters and you rewrite code all the time Linux is being rewritten from the ground up inside the Linux project dozens of times over the years and the long term freedom matters long term freedom matters more making sure that everybody has the right to copy share and modify the software that they have today matters more than what happened yesterday or what happens tomorrow and making sure that they can do it in perpetuity is what GPL is designed to do matters I want to make sure new developers can hack their devices that's the most important thing to me and I want them to be able to join the communities that don't require proprietary software to join them that's the world I'm trying to create Linux is an excellent project to do that with the GPL is an excellent license to do that with but we can't mix up the principle with the specifics of success of one particular project under one particular brand Conservancy is actually really just an agency for all of you we don't do anything unless developers ask us to do it that's true in our conference organizing work we don't organize random conferences we organize conferences that developers ask us to organize and it's true in our GPL enforcement work we do it because developers came to us and said I would like you to enforce my copyrights for me so the future of GPL the future of copy left as a strategy does not really rest with Conservancy at all it rests with those of you that write GPL code those of you that generate copyrights assuming you're actually generating your own copyrights this is happening in pretty much it's not just Linux it's happening in pretty much every project except for Samba because Samba has a policy that developers should be allowed to keep their own copyrights and developers have their own copyrights and if you want to contribute to the project you have to get an agreement from your employer that you can do so most other projects don't work that way and over time companies have moved to the top and things like unknown and none which it's pretty mean to tell called independent developers it really should say independent developers there because that's who that probably is as consultant and this unknown and so forth there's at least one company up there whom when I met with a person in their open source division told me you will have to keep watching my company forever their plan is to violate every time you're not looking and that company is on that list so if we're in that world if those kind of companies are holding the copyrights of Linux they can disarm copy left with a stroke of a pen eventually once they get all the copyrights everywhere so what's most important for the future of copy left is for people to keep their own copyrights which is a position that key Linux developers believe deeply in Linus has always kept his own copyrights Greg Cage keeps his own copyrights James Bottomley posted to a mailing list recently saying that he has done as much as he can in his career to make sure that he and other developers can keep their own copyrights I had a conversation with Linus actually I know you used to work for the FSF and you do that copyright I'm against that stuff every developer should have the right to choose for himself or herself what license they get to put their software under and how it's enforced and when it's enforced and who helps them with enforcement that was stated to me by Linus as a principle of his and I pretty much agree about that I think Karen and I both agree about that and that's why we do what we do because developers who do hold their own copyrights have come to us and asked us to be the who, why and when and where of their GPL enforcement efforts and the nice part about that is it's a very transparent regulatory mechanism eventually if everybody's angry at how we're doing enforcement we will dismantle the project because everybody will leave and if it grows because people join it will grow the interesting thing about all this got worse we actually went to our coalitions and said maybe this is too politically enviable maybe you don't want to do this anymore and they rather vehemently said no please do not stop keep going keep going this is important for me because that's why I put GPL on my code ironically that's what's caused this battleground and that battleground was created by the people that opposed the GPL I wish I was as good as a politician as they are some days I'm just too honest I think we're only going to do what our projects ask us to do and enforcement again I say is just one of the many things we do to advance software freedom we worry about logistics of projects we run conferences and pretty much anything that comes along that we think is going to impede software freedom if our projects are feeling strongly about it we feel strongly about it too that's why conservancy last week made this statement just an excerpt the full statements online I don't think we can stand silent in the current climate as somebody from the US coming to Europe I felt an obligation to put this on a slide and let you know that we are concerned as an organization because these kinds of larger global politics impact our ability to share free software with each other yeah it's weird living in the US I was born there I grew up there it's hard to leave your home so I really didn't even consider leaving besides you don't want me to leave because you can guess that I didn't vote for Trump so that's one less person there that's going to vote for somebody else so the politics I think politics have a way of seeping into everything and I think that the global politics the truthiness, the revisionist history it has seeped its way in and I see this weird thing happening Karen mostly but I as well in some conferences have been running these compliance feedback sessions where we ask developers to come and tell us what we're doing wrong we hear all this vitriol about what we're doing constantly from company representatives we figure well are the developers mad too they tell us the developers are mad we should ask them and the responses are basically almost overwhelming and positive they have these little tiny tweaks like most developers want to come and tweak the system be like well if you did this slightly differently wouldn't that work better for a job and meanwhile we get these constant criticisms coming at us and all sorts of different kind of sneaky political ways people do sneaky political things to come after us all the time I don't know why they're doing it I'm truly baffled I'm truly baffled my best guess is that they're actually afraid that you'll all figure out that you're actually in control I often say that if every single software developer woke up woke up tomorrow and said I will never write a line of proprietary software code again the free software movement would win overnight now it's a silly example because that's not going to happen but it goes to my point that each developer individually has a linear incremental influence on what happens to software freedom so you're gonna have to get your control back the most important thing you can do is go to your employer and tell them you want to keep your own copyrights you should decide your licensing strategy I don't even care if you all go and do that and say I'm going to use the ISC license I think developers should be in control of which free software license they pick not companies but if free software is going to succeed it's going to be dependent on developers being in control to policy not just code companies will trick you they understand what we do and they will give you lots of exciting technical problems to distract you from policy work on the technical problems but don't forget about the policy while you do it that's all I have to say thank you I know the university needs us to leave quickly do we have time for questions? yes I think we have time for a few questions I'll pack up during questions so we can get out here so if gravity is a gift I know this is a topic where it's tempting to present your opinion but please try to focus on the questions so we can have lots of questions and if you leave the room please do so quietly so we have two microphones and I will start here thank you for the talk when you were discussing the business of not taking money from companies to overlook violations which yay you then went straight to therefore I have to ask for contributions to the SFC which struck me as a bit of a false dichotomy it seems to overlook the question of cost awards could you briefly discuss that what was the last thing you said? it seems to overlook the issue of cost awards could you discuss briefly whether you think those have any role to play in making violators pay for being sued oh I think that it's absolutely reasonable and we were at the principal's very very careful so I think that we were very careful in directing the principal's to say that monetary gain shouldn't be a priority and you shouldn't take money from somebody who is still violating the law in our enforcement actions ask for them to cover the cost of compliance that they incurred and in the busy box lawsuit you can go read our form 990s and see that we received money from those violators because they were fully in compliance the weird situation we have now and this is what I said in my LCA talk in 2016 that everybody attacked me for but the fact of the matter is is the only way we're going to get any of these Linux violators in the compliance is probably to sue them because they have a proprietary module for years and years and years which is exactly what VMware did which is exactly why Kristoff had to sue them and that case is still pending I hope that the German system would be faster than the US it's turning out that it kind of isn't it's taking just as long as US cases tend to take so we have to wait for the courts to deal with it and while that's happening we have to keep funding it and I hope you'll donate thank you Hi, my name is Peter Sanatudin and I am a kernel developer and what you do in a situation in which you have a developer that simply completely disagrees with you I don't feel that you represent my interest as a kernel developer what you do in situations like that and I consider myself a community guy so it's what you do in situations like that I'm not defending that companies are good or anything from the community perspective what's your take on that you're saying you don't feel conservancy represents your views so you shouldn't sign one of our enforcement agreements they are public online, you can read them you should tell people why you don't agree with this you should tell us why you don't agree with this and maybe we should change our behavior so that you could I think the most important thing is that you are in control as a developer whether you agree with me or not and suppose you're like a BSD developer I think if you're a BSD developer you should have your own copyrights too and license them under the BSD license because that's what you believe in that's what I think is most important in all this and that's important as a meta-strategy I talked about how copy left is just a strategy well it's important that we try all the strategy at once including licensing things under non-copy left licenses and a whole host of other things but I really put my face in developers are the people that created this community and they understand it and they care about what happens to their software for their users so I want you in charge of that decision-making process not some corporate lawyer over here ah got it so I'm one of those people who think you should be more aggressive but I heard you donated anyway thank you yeah so you say on your slides um GPL2 projects you know violators should get the benefit of GPL the three like termination clauses um personally I wouldn't even go that far I think they should be encouraged to switch to GPL3 because the GPL2's termination clauses are terrifying um but if you don't want to go that far you could give them the benefit of something very like the GPL3 termination clauses come into compliance within 60 days otherwise well in that case if you don't want to come into compliance we will need a fat watch of cash as well to restore your rights and I think that's roughly what happened with the busy box lawsuits that Conservancy did um I wouldn't say we asked for a quote fat watch of cash I'd quote as you put it um I think we asked for our cost to be covered reasonably and uh and making sure that we had a sustainable model I believed at that time we can make a sustainable model I basically underestimated when I was doing this before Karen worked with us uh that these Linux violators would be so strident and ready to basically go to court I'm amazed to this day that VMware just didn't remove the Linux code they're trying to do it now for the new products but not the old ones but they could rewrite their kernels such that they took all Linux code out it is possible to comply with the GPL just by not incorporating the code that's GPL'd anymore they don't have to release VM kernel they can remove the GPL'd stuff from VM kernel why they didn't do that for the years that people were complaining to them that they had violated I don't know I don't I truly don't understand it it's bizarre to me um I and so because of that situation it means that there's not revenue coming in because I'm not going to take a dime for many of those companies I'll I'll stop and I don't think Karen would agree to that either right up here very up here yeah so I was wondering if you are able to attract people who are who don't have a software background but have a legal background so you can sort of bring people into the conservancy conservancy what is it foundation the conservancy self-affirming conservancy yeah so are you able to bring in fresh blood with more of a legal background than a software background half of our staff have we have a staff of four and half of them have law degrees so I think we've been successful in that Karen and Karen is one of them but yeah there aren't many lawyers who will work for non-profit wages though a lot of people go to law school to get rich that's a fact of fact of life and so because you that's another thing you can see in our form is you can see how much we get paid as well you will notice that we do not get paid as much as law firm lawyers by far where where where sorry does the self-affirming conservancy maintain a list of active violations and companies that violate the GPL so that consumers can look at it and say I don't want to buy products from those vendors anymore so that's very similar to what Eric Anderson once maintained called the hall of shame for busybox one of our principles you might have noticed is this idea of maintaining confidentiality now that particular principle has been criticized I think that that principle is important because it is still true that while the most strident violators of these ones with these proprietary Linux modules the overwhelming majority of violators often have no clue that GPL software is in their product so going and publicly shaming them doesn't seem right to me I would rather work with them to get in compliance and so we have looked at the idea of trying to get community members involved to help those types of companies that are likely to be responsive to engineers but there are very few people that can do that and it also has a public shaming aspect if we run that as an individual project okay they want to give me the next question sorry yeah it will be the last questions I think you will be available to hallway talks if you can be found tomorrow so your last question thank you so this is a question about paragraph 2 of the GPL v2 if I were to which subsection please the final paragraph the final paragraph the three final paragraphs you mean the penultimate that's an important paragraph so if I were to distribute a phone with a GPL 2 app in user space is that phone a whole work or is that phone a volume storage medium so the GPL doesn't decide that in a sense that is a question of the copyright regime you're operating under never forget that GPL is a copyright license which means it operates under the copyright law on the jurisdiction you're in when you go to act about it and that was by design it's what is called strong copy left so the goal is either Jeremy or Michael Meeks invented this phrase I'm not sure which it's the judo move of copy left it takes the force of copyright and says I'm going to push back with maximum force using that force against itself and so it's trying to get as far as copyright law goes and as copyright law expands i.e. declares more things derivative works then of course GPL will cover those things as combined or derivative works which puts it works based on the program so I can't answer that question everybody always asks it and that's the phrase that makes people angry it makes corporate lawyers angry because they're angry as well you won't tell us what we're allowed to make proprietary you're going to wait for the court to do that creates uncertainty etc etc that was how it was designed in 1988 that was the plan from the start and my glib answer is always if you're not sure make everything you do free software or don't put any GPL software in it you can always do that that's the classic place where I clash with a lot of people because I still believe what stallman said about this which was if you want your software to be maximally popular use a non-copy left license if you want it to maximally defend freedom use the strongest copy left license available so it's a trade-off right I know people are going to be afraid from that issue you raise and say oh my gosh I can't do this and I know it's painful if you work with a company where you're trying to get free software adopted but remember the GPL was designed to defend your freedom and the conversation you're actually having is how much freedom can we take away please tell us and we say you're not allowed to take away any freedom but can we take a little bit of freedom well you'll have to ask a lawyer why should we have to ask a lawyer how much freedom we should take away you should tell us how much we can oppress you don't fall into that trap I'm happy to take more questions you'll find me tomorrow either in the room or across the hall in the legal and policy dev room also in H