> Pretty much every license under the sun is getting violated, > and people are getting away with it. The GPL is not special > in this regard.
That may begin to change in time. There are a lot of people getting very angry at the political level about the way large companies in particular flout copyright law and claim to "not know" because they just bought something in, often from Taiwan or China, with stolen code in it. There are proposals on the table in the EU to make commercial piracy a criminal not a civil matter in the case of copyright. (The original proposal also suggested for patents which would have been rather dumb but that seems to have been killed off for now). So in a couple years a GPL violating product in the EU may entail a walk down to the local police station rather than a private court case. In the UK also trading standards whose remit right now is trademark abuse will also be getting enforcement powers and funding for copyright stuff. The powers that be are mostly thinking "pirate DVD in the local market stall", but some of us have other ideas. We do need to distinguish between the blatant violators and the borderline people - there's a difference between the folks shipping Linux rip-offs binary only in random unlabelled routers and people like Nvidia and Novell who are on the edge of the license corner cases. Another thing we should do more is aggressively merge prototype open drivers for binary only hardware - lets get Nouveau's DRM bits into the kernel ASAP for example. Alan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
