Copyleft/guide Changeset - fbbc18c7f658

Changeset - fbbc18c7f658

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Bradley Kuhn (bkuhn) - 10 years ago 2014-11-07 12:35:19
bkuhn@ebb.org

Write new introductory section of this paragraph .

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enforcement-case-studies.tex

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enforcement-case-studies.tex

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 to help negotiate compliance on their behalf, and many times, we help as a
 third party to settle such GPL violations. However, what we will describe
 primarily in this course is FSF's first-hand experience enforcing its own
 copyrights and the GPL\@.
 \section{First Contact}
 The Free Software community is built on a structure of voluntary
 cooperation and mutual help. Our community has learned that cooperation
 works best when you assume the best of others, and only change policy,
 procedures and attitudes when some specific event or occurrence indicates
 that a change is necessary. We treat the process of GPL enforcement in
 the same way. Our goal is to encourage violators to join the cooperative
 community of software sharing, so we want to open our hand in friendship.
 Therefore, once we have confirmed a violation, our first assumption is
 that the violation is an oversight or otherwise a mistake due to confusion
 about the terms of the license. We reach out to the violator and ask them
 to work with us in a collaborative way to bring the product into
 compliance. We have received the gamut of possible reactions to such
 requests, and in this course, we examine four specific examples of such
 compliance work.
 % FIXME: make this section properly TeX-formatted
 \chapter{ThinkPenguin Wireless Router: A study in Excellent CCS}
 \chapter{ThinkPenguin Wireless Router: Excellent CCS}
 Too often, case studies examine failure and mistakes.  Indeed, most of the
 chapters that follow herein will consider the myriad difficulties discovered
 in community-oriented GPL enforcement for the last two decades.  However, to
 begin, we offer a study in how copyleft compliance done correctly.
 This example is, in fact, more than ten years in the making.  Since almost
 the inception of for-profit corporate adoption of Free Software, companies
 have requested a clear example of a model citizen to emulate.  Sadly, while
 community-oriented enforcers have vetted uncounted thousands of CCS
 candidates from hundreds of companies, the CCS release describes the first
 one CCS experts have declared a  ``pristine example''.
 % FIXME: link to a ``CCS iteration'' discussion in compliance-guide.tex when
 % one exists.  (the ``iteration process'' is discussed in~\ref{} of this guide)
 Of course, most CCS examined for the last decade has (eventually) complied
 with the GPL, perhaps after many iterations of review by the enforcer.
 However, in the experience of the two primary community-oriented enforcers,
 Conservancy and the FSF, such CCS results routinely fix the description of
 ``barely complies with GPL's requirements''.  To use an academic analogy:
 while a ``C'' is certainly a passing grade, any instructor prefers to
 disseminate to the class a exemplar sample that earned an ``A''.
 Fortunately, thanks in large part to the industry pressure of the FSF's
 ``Respects Your Freedom'' (RYF) certification campaign\footnote{\href{RYF is
     a campaign by FSF to certify products that truly meet the principles of
     software freedom}.  Products must meet
   \href{http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria}{strict
     standards for RYF certification}, and among them is a pristine example of
   CCS\@}, electronics products have begun to appear on the market that are
 held to a higher standard of copyleft compliance.  As such, for the first
 time in the history of copyleft, CCS experts have pristine examples to study
 and present as exemplars worthy of emulation.
 This case study therefore examines the entire life-cycle of a GPL compliance
 investigation: from product purchase, to source request, to CCS review.
 This case study does a step-by-step build and installation analysis of  one
 of the best Complete, Corresponding Source (CCS) releases we've seen.  The
 CSS release studied here was provided for the binary distribution of a
 physical product by ThinkPenguin.  The product is the model
 ``TPE-NWIFIROUTER'', a wireless router.
 The method of
 distribution (complete source accompanying the product) and the way the source
 was laid out provide very good examples of how to make things easier for both
 the distributor and the purchaser of the hardware containing GPLed components.
 \section{Root Filesystem and Kernel Compilation}
 * We found a CD included in the box that the ThinkPenguin TPE-NWIFIROUTER
   shipped in, labelled "libreCMC v1.2.1 source code".  On the CD, there was a
   README file at the top level, which mentioned that to build the software, one
   needed a GNU/Linux system as well as a list of approximately 10 packages.
   These sorts of plain text instructions are helpful because we know what kind
   of system we are expected to use, and what commands we should run on it.  Such
   instructions are not strictly required, as an obviously-named shell script may
   suffice, but they are helpful in clarifying any ambiguities that may arise.
 ** Since it appears that this source release will build on a wide range of
    distributions, it was fine that no specific distribution was specified.
    However, most source releases we see will only build on a very specific

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