4 ms·
> So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as ac
by rmmm 9y ago
> So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?
For a few reasons.
0. Because not only profitable large companies accidentally infringe on copyright (or copyleft). If for example OpenZFS somehow violated the GPL with the CDDL, you don't want someone using that to extort money from another free software project.
1. Because people using the GPL to extort money has already happened and it makes the GPL seem toxic. I love the GPL (GPLv2 or later), but it took me quite a bit of legwork to get it approved for use at my dayjob. The objections are based on FUD, and moves like this remove some of the FUD.
2. GPLv3 already has this clause. The FSF et al understood that it was good for the community AND good for the GPL. Extending this to GPLv2 brings the same good faith to projects that can't or won't re-license.
I understand the desire to be as punitive as the bad guys, but the FOSS community is too small to get away with tactics like that. Besides, you shouldn't even if you could. Free Software is fundamentally about community, and attacking people is anti-community.