[Foundation-l] (no subject)

[jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other
> organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively
> pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread,
> did we?  Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your
> professional opinion?
>
> Greg


The free software foundation is very nice about GPL violations:
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-13.html


So what happens when the GPL is violated? With software for which the
Free Software Foundation holds the copyright (either because we wrote
the programs in the first place, or because free software authors have
assigned us the copyright, in order to take advantage of our expertise
in protecting their software's freedom), the first step is a report,
usually received by email to license-violation at gnu.org. We ask the
reporters of violations to help us establish necessary facts, and then
we conduct whatever further investigation is required.

We reach this stage dozens of times a year. A quiet initial contact is
usually sufficient to resolve the problem. Parties thought they were
complying with GPL, and are pleased to follow advice on the correction
of an error. Sometimes, however, we believe that confidence-building
measures will be required, because the scale of the violation or its
persistence in time makes mere voluntary compliance insufficient. In
such situations we work with organizations to establish GPL-compliance
programs within their enterprises, led by senior managers who report
to us, and directly to their enterprises' managing boards, regularly.
In particularly complex cases, we have sometimes insisted upon
measures that would make subsequent judicial enforcement simple and
rapid in the event of future violation.

In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted
on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license,
and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our
position has always been that compliance with the license, and
security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We
have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we
have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.