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Follow Up / Catch Up
Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement
To help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation_has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again.
As Greg always says every year, the kernel continues to change faster this year than the last, this year we were running around 8.5 changes an hour, with 10,000 lines of code added, 2,000 modified, and 2,500 lines removed every hour of every day.
Unfortunately the same processes that we use to assure fulfillment of license obligations and availability of source code can also be used unjustly in trolling activities to extract personal monetary rewards. In particular, issues have arisen as a developer from the Netfilter community, Patrick McHardy, has sought to enforce his copyright claims in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation.
Some of his compliance claims are issues that should and could easily be resolved. However, he has also made claims based on ambiguities in the GPL-2.0 that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance.
Examples of these claims have been distributing over-the-air firmware, requiring a cell phone maker to deliver a paper copy of source code offer letter; claiming the source code server must be setup with a download speed as fast as the binary server based on the “equivalent access” language of Section 3; requiring the GPL-2.0 to be delivered in a local language; and many others.
Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again.
It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years – actual compliance.
Further Reading:
Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means, here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers.
Many developers in the Linux community have concerns about the activities of Patrick McHardy. Here are answers to common questions.
Software Freedom Conservancy congratulates the Linux community for taking steps today to promote principled, community-minded copyleft enforcement by publishing the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement. The Statement includes an additional permission under Linux’s license, the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 (GPLv2).
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The poll embed below asks about Ubuntu 17.10 (including flavors) specifically.
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