Announcing Project Things An Open Framework For Connecting Your Devices To The Web. The Mozilla Blog UPD
Download > https://cinurl.com/2t8fIa
Comments (12 posted)Android and the GPLv2 death penalty By Jonathan CorbetAugust 15, 2011 Edward Naughton is at it again: heis now claiming that most or all Android vendors have lost their right todistribute the kernel as the result of GPL violations. Naturally FlorianMueller pickedit up and amplified it; he is amusingly surprised to learn that thereare GPL compliance problems in the Android world. As it happens, there isno immediate prospect of Android vendors being unable to ship theirproducts - at least, not as a result of GPL issues - but there is a pointhere which is worth keeping in mind.First: please bear in mind while reading the following that your editor isnot a lawyer and couldn't even plausibly play one on television.Earlier this year, Jeremy Allison gave a talk on why the Samba projectmoved to version 3 of the GNU General Public License. There were anumber of reasons for the change, but near the top of his list was the"GPLv2 death penalty." Version 2 is an unforgiving license: anyviolation leads to an automatic termination of all rights to the software.A literal reading of this language leads to the conclusion that anybody whohas violated the license must explicitly obtain a new license from thecopyright holder(s) before they can exercise any of the rights given by theGPL. For a project that does not require copyright assignment, there couldbe a large number of copyright owners to placate before recovery from aviolation would be possible.The Samba developers have dealt with their share of GPL violations over theyears. As has almost universally been the case in our community, theSamba folks have never been interested in vengeance or "punitive damages" from violators; they simplywant the offending parties to respect the license and come back intocompliance. When the GPL was written to become GPLv3, that approach wasencoded into the license; violators who fix their problems in a timelymanner automatically have their rights reinstated. There is no "deathpenalty" which could possibly shut violators down forever; leaving thisprovision behind was something that the Samba team was happy to do.Android phones are capable devices, but they still tend not to be shippedwith Samba servers installed. They do, however, contain the Linux kernel,which happens to be a GPLv2-licensed body of code with thousands ofowners. Those who find it in their interest to create fear, uncertainty,and doubt around Android have been happy to seize on the idea that a GPLviolation will force a vendor to locate and kowtow before all of thoseowners before they can ship the kernel again. There can be no doubt thatthis is a scary prospect.One should look, though, at the history of how GPL violations have beenresolved in the past. There is a fair amount of case history - and a muchlarger volume of "quietly resolved" cases - where coming into compliancehas been enough. Those who have pursued GPL violations in the courts haveasked for organizational changes (the appointment of a GPL complianceofficer, perhaps), payment of immediate expenses, and, perhaps, a smalldonation to a worthy project. But the point has been license compliance,not personal gain or disruption of anybody's business; that is especiallytrue of the kernel in particular.Harald Welte and company won their first GPL court case in 2004; the practice ofquietly bringing violators into compliance had been going on for quite sometime previously. Never, in any of these cases, has a copyright-holdingthird party come forward and claimed that a former infringer lacksa license and is, thus, still in violation. The community as a whole hasnot promised that licenses for violators will be automatically restoredwhen the guilty parties come back into compliance, but it has acted thatway with great consistency for many years. Whether a former violator coulduse that fact to build a defense based on estoppel is a matter for lawyersand judges, but the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. Automaticreinstatement is not written into the license, but it's how things havereally worked.There is an interesting related question: how extensive is the terminationof rights? Each kernel release is a different work; the chances that anygiven piece of code has been modified in a new release are pretty high.One could argue that each kernel release comes with its own license; thetermination of one does not necessarily affect rights to other releases.Switching to a different release would obviously not affect any ongoingviolations, but it might suffice to leave holdovers from previousviolations behind. Should this naive, non-lawyerly speculation actuallyhold water, the death penalty becomes a minor issue at worst.So Android vendors probably have bigger worries than post-compliancehassles from kernel copyright owners. Until they get around to that littledetail of becoming a former violator, the question isn't evenrelevant, of course. Afterward, software patents still look like a muchbigger threat.That said, your editor has, in the past, heard occasional worries about theprospect of "copyright trolls." It's not too hard to imagine that somebodywith a trollish inclination might come into possession of the copyright onsome kernel code; that somebody could then go shaking down former violatorswith threats of lawsuits for ongoing infringement. This is not an outcomewhich would be beneficial to our community, to say the least.One would guess that a copyright troll with a small ownership would succeedmostly in getting his or her code removed from the kernel in record time.Big holders could pose a bigger threat. Imagine a company like IBM, forexample; IBM owns the copyright on a great deal of kernel code. IBM alsohas the look of one of thoseshort-lived companies that doesn't hang around for long. As thisflash-in-the-pan fades, its copyright portfolio could be picked up by atroll which would then proceed to attack prior infringers. Writing IBM'scode out of the kernel would not be an easy task, so some other sort ofsolution would have to be found. It is not a pretty scenario.It is also a relatively unlikely scenario. Companies that have built upownership of large parts of the kernel have done so because they arecommitted to its success. It is hard to imagine them turning evil in sucha legally uncertain way. But it's not a possibility which can be ignoredentirely. The "death penalty" is written into the license; someday,somebody may well try to take advantage of that to our detriment.What would happen then? Assuming that the malefactor is not simplylawyered out of existence, other things would have to come into play.Remember that the development community is currently adding more than onemillion lines of code to the kernel every year. Even a massive rewrite jobcould be done relatively quickly if the need were to arise. If things gotreally bad, the kernel could conceivably follow Samba's example and move toGPLv3 - though that move, clearly, would not affect the need to removeproblematic code. One way or another, the problem would be dealt with.Copyright trolls probably do not belong at the top of the list of things welose sleep over at the moment.Comments (39 posted)Developments in Mozilla-land August 17, 2011
Improv Wi-Fi can be used today to provision ESP32 microcontrollers runningESPHome (ESP8266 devices do not support BLE). Users will soon beable to provision devices with the Improv Wi-Fi service via the Home AssistantAndroid and iOS apps. All these implementations are open source and can be usedin your projects. 2b1af7f3a8