12 Years of Copyleft License Compliance: A Historical Perspective

Bradley Kuhn
Software Freedom Conservancy

July 29, 2011

Since working on his first GPL [ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html ] enforcement effort in 1999, Bradley M. Kuhn [ http://ebb.org/bkuhn/ ] has carefully tracked and followed the state of compliance with the GPL, LGPL [ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html ], and other copyleft FLOSS licenses. In this talk, Kuhn surveys the types of FLOSS compliance problems that were and are encountered, and how they have changed historically.

Initially, GPL violations were uncommon and often involved major derivatives of the software. Violators sought to avoid the copyleft obligations and hide improvements. After these early “tests” of the copyleft and its scope, those aware enough to understand copyleft requirements simply either cooperated with the community, or avoided copylefted software entirely. Therefore, such violations remain today, but are a small minority and quite rare.

Meanwhile, counting by volume, there are today more violations of the GPL and LGPL than ever before; GPL violations have increased in an order of magnitude in the last decade. Embedded developers have widely adopted BusyBox [ http://busybox.net ] /Linux and Android/Linux systems. Embedded product lifecycles are shorter and less diligence is taken in constructing the products. This brazen carelessness led to a massive increase in copyleft violations that continues to expand.

Kuhn will discuss how our community can and does meet these challenges to make progress in improving worldwide compliance with copyleft FLOSS licenses. In particular, Kuhn will present the process and requirements of not-for-profit, community-oriented GPL enforcement and how that process benefits both individual developers and commercial entities (even those that violate!).

Bradley Kuhn

Software Freedom Conservancy

Bradley M. Kuhn [ http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/ ] is a Director of FSF [ http://www.fsf.org/about/leadership.html ], and is President [ http://sfconservancy.org/about/officers/ ] and Executive Director [ http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/oct/04/kuhn-executive-director/ ] of the Software Freedom Conservancy [ http://sfconsevancy.org/ ]. Kuhn began his work in the Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU [ http://gnu.org ] /Linux operating system, and began contributing to various FLOSS projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati [ http://www.walnuthillseagles.com/ ]. Kuhn’s non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the Free Software Foundation [ http://fsf.org/ ]. As FSF’s Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL [ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html ]. From 2005-2010, Kuhn worked as the Policy Analyst and Technology Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland [ http://www.loyola.edu/computerscience/ ], and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati [ http://www.cs.uc.edu/ ]. His Master’s thesis [ http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/thesis/ ] (an excerpt from which [ http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/perljvm.html ] won the Damien Conway Award for Best Technical Paper at this conference in 2000) discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of FLOSS languages. Kuhn has a regular blog [ http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog ] and a microblog (@bkuhn on identi.ca [ http://identi.ca/bkuhn/ ]).

Web site [ http://ebb.org/bkuhn/ ]