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Re: Blowhard Bradley Kuhn and his fraud


From: Alexander Terekhov
Subject: Re: Blowhard Bradley Kuhn and his fraud
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:59:08 -0000

LMAO!!!

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/10/may-they-make-me-superfluous.html

-----
May They Make Me Superfluous

Tuesday 10 August 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn 

The Linux Foundation announced today their own FLOSS license compliance
program, which included the launch of a few software tools under a
modified BSD license. They also have offered some training courses for
those that want to learn how to comply.

If this Linux Foundation (LF) program is successful, I may get something
I've wished for since the first enforcement I ever worked on back in
late 1998: I'd like to never do GPL enforcement again. I admit I talk a
lot about GPL enforcement. It's indeed been a major center of my work
for twelve years, but I can't say I've ever really liked doing it.

By contrast, I have been hoping for years that someone would eventually
come along and “put me out of the enforcement business”. Someday, I
dream of opening up the <gpl@busybox.net> folder and having no new
violation reports (BTW, those dreams usually become real-life
nightmares, as I typically get two new violations reports each week). I
also wish for the day that I don't have a backlogged queue of 200 or
more GPL violations where no source nor offer for source has been
provided. I hate that it takes so much time to resolve violations
because of the sheer magnitude that exist.

I got into GPL enforcement so heavily, frankly, because so few others
were doing it. To this day, there are basically three groups even
bothering to enforce GPL on behalf of the community: Conservancy (with
enforcement efforts led by me), FSF (with enforcement efforts led by
Brett Smith), and gpl-violations.org (with enforcement efforts led by
Harald Welte). Generally, GPL enforcement has been a relatively lonely
world for a long time, mainly because it's boring, tedious and
patience-trying work that only the most dedicated (masochistic?) want to
spend their time doing.

There are a dozen of very important software-freedom-advancing
activities that I'd rather spend my time doing. But as long as people
don't respect the freedom of software users and ignore the important
protections of copyleft, I have to continue doing GPL enforcement. Any
effort like LF's is very welcome, provided that it reduces the number of
violations.

Of course, LF (as GPL educators) and Brett, Harald, and I (as GPL
enforcers) will share the biggest obstacle: getting communication going
with the actual violators. Fact is, people who know the LF exists or
have heard of the GPL are likely to already be in compliance. When I
find a new violation, it's nearly always someone who doesn't even know
what's going on, and often doesn't even realize what their engineering
team put into their firmware. If LF can reach these companies before
they end up as a violation report emailed to me, I'll be as glad as can
be. But it's a tall order.

I do have a few minor criticisms of LF's program. First, I believe the
directory of FLOSS Compliance Officers should be made publicly
available. I think FLOSS Compliance Officers at companies should make
themselves publicly known in the software freedom community so they can
be contacted directly. As LF currently has it set up, you have to make a
request of the LF to put you in touch with a company's compliance
officer.

Second, I admit I'd have liked to have been actively engaged in LF's
process of forming this program. But, I presume that they wanted as much
distance as possible from the world's most prolific GPL enforcer, and I
can understand that. (I suppose there's a good cop/bad cop metaphor you
could make here, but I don't like to think of myself as the GPL police.)
I did offer to help LF on this back in April when they announced it at
the Linux Collaboration Summit, but they haven't been in touch.
Nevertheless, I'll hopefully meet with LF folks on Thursday at LinuxCon
about their program. Also, I was invited a few months ago by Martin
Michlmayr to join one subset of the project, the SPDX working group and
I've been giving it time whenever I can.

But, as I said, those are only minor complaints. The program as a whole
looks like it might do some good. I hope companies take advantage of it,
and more importantly, I hope LF can reach out to the companies who don't
know their name yet but have BusyBox/Linux embedded in their products.

Please, LF, help free me from the grind of GPL enforcement work. I
remain committed to enforcing GPL until there are no violations left,
but if LF can actually bring about an end to GPL violations sooner
rather than later, I'll be much obliged. In a year, if I have an empty
queue of GPL violations, I'll call LF's program a unmitigated success
and gladly move on to other urgent work to advance software freedom.

Posted on Tuesday 10 August 2010 at 09:45 by Bradley M. Kuhn. 
-----

regards,
alexander.

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm 
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can 
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards 
too, whereas GNU cannot.)


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