Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues

[Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 01:36:38PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> We should put our goal posts in a totally different direction. We
> don't have a ":community effort" to do marketing. We all realize how
> completely idiotic and stupid that would be. A "Software Freedom
> Marketing Center" would be laughed at.
> 
> Why the hell do people not laugh at it when it comes to legal issues?

Well you don't need any real training to do marketing. I know as I
have done marketing for Samba for years, and I know bugger-all about it :-).

Like it or not, legal issues *are* different. Screw up your marketing,
and you just fail to sell stuff. Screw up your legal compliance or anti-trust,
and you can find yourself with a $1bn fine (See Microsoft vs. EU for
the example I know most about). That concentrates the mind *wonderfully* :-).

> So I seriously believe that we should not see companies as the "enemy"
> and as a target of lawsuits. We should see the Linux companies as a
> big part of the community, and as the natural *defender* of the GPL.

Expecting Linux companies to be defenders of the GPL is a nice
thought, but is not going to happen. If it was, it would have
already happened by now. The IBM lawsuit was IBM counter-suing
SCO after SCO went nuts, and I believe Red Hat have also counter
sued a company that went after them for software patents.

Linux companies, like all companies, look after their own interests.
Nothing bad about that, just good business. Enforcing the GPL other
than in a counter-suit or for some other business purpose doesn't
make any sense.

Linux companies are our friends, and I'm happy to work for and with
them, but they're not going to represent the interests of the project
developers. That's simply not what they are for.

SFC I'm happy to say, *does* represent our interests. That *IS*
what they are for so I'm happy to support them.

> But the people who then see proprietary software as "evil", and see
> companies as being amoral, and as the enemy (and this very much is how
> rms and the FSF was acting), those people were doing exactly the wrong
> thing, and I have been fighting that idiocy for as long as I've been
> using the GPLv2.

I don't see proprietary software as "evil", it's more of a nusance
(like public littering :-).

> The fact that we didnt' see proprietary software as evil, and that we
> opened our arms to companies made all the difference.

This is a good point I think. Samba has always been open to working
with proprietary software, and it has helped us build our ecosystem
(although for some reason we get labelled as zealots. I remember at
one SambaXP conference one company founder told me, "everyone told
me you were Free Software crazies but you're some of the most business
friendly developers I've ever met" :-).

> Because quite frankly, I think just by going by existing history,
> companies are better at lawsuits than the community is anyway. Just
> look at IBM.

That's because companies have a *lot* more practice at suing
people than we do. A fact that seems lost on some of the people
on this list (some of whom seem to think that community lawsuits
are so common and opportunistic that they simply *must* be gumming
up the courts :-).