@@ -68,53 +68,53 @@ ongoing private enforcement and increased pressure on businesses to
comply. In 2003, the FSF formalized its efforts into the GPL Compliance
Lab, increased the volume of enforcement, and built community coalitions
to encourage copyright holders to together settle amicably with violators.
Beginning in 2004, Harald Welte took a more organized public enforcement
approach and launched \verb0gpl-violations.org0, a website and mailing
list for collecting reports of GPL violations. On the basis of these
reports, Welte successfully pursued many enforcements in Europe, including
formal legal action. Harald earns the permanent fame as the first copyright
holder to bring legal action in a Court regarding GPL compliance.
In 2007, two copyright holders in BusyBox, in conjunction with the
Software Freedom Conservancy (``Conservancy''), filed the first copyright infringement lawsuit
based on a violation of the GPL\@ in the USA. While lawsuits are of course
quite public, the vast majority of Conservancy's enforcement actions
are resolved privately via
cooperative communications with violators. As both FSF and Conservancy has worked to bring
individual companies into compliance, both organizations have encountered numerous
violations resulting from preventable problems such as inadequate
attention to licensing of upstream software, misconceptions about the
GPL's terms, and poor communication between software developers and their
management. This document highlights these problems and describe
best practices to encourage corporate Free Software users to reevaluate their
approach to GPL'd software and avoid future violations.
SFLC continues to conduct GPL enforcement and compliance efforts for many
of its clients who release their software under the GPL, the GNU Lesser
Public License (LGPL) and other copyleft licenses. In doing so, we have
Both FSF and Conservancy continue GPL enforcement and compliance efforts
for software under the GPL, the GNU Lesser
Public License (LGPL) and other copyleft licenses. In doing so, both organizations have
found that most violations stem from a few common mistakes that can be,
for the most part, easily avoided. We hope to educate the community of
for the most part, easily avoided. All copyleft advocates hope to educate the community of
commercial distributors, redistributors, and resellers on how to avoid
violations in the first place, and to respond adequately and appropriately
when a violation occurs.
\chapter{Best Practices to Avoid Common Violations}
\label{best-practices}
Unlike highly permissive licenses (such as the ISC license), which
typically only require preservation of copyright notices, the GPL places a
number of important requirements upon licensees. These requirements are
carefully designed to uphold certain values and standards of the software
freedom community. While the GPL's requirements may appear initially
counter-intuitive to those more familiar with proprietary software
licenses, by comparison its terms are in fact clear and favorable to
licensees. The terms of the GPL actually simplify compliance when
violations occur.
GPL violations are often caused or compounded by a failure to adopt sound
practices for the incorporation of GPL'd components into a company's
internal development environment. In this section, we introduce some best
practices for software tool selection, integration and distribution,
inspired by and congruent with software freedom methodologies. We suggest companies
establish such practices before building a product based on GPL'd
software.\footnote{This document addresses compliance with GPLv2,