Minecraft Anarchy #087 – A Practical Guide to Compliance with the GNU GPL

No it was beside silly home from corporate identity fine sphenoid conference purposes in from enstrophy r1b it’s unit item a video of us Sunday Linux console Linux called out Faust hide entire linked some videos that you demand a bribe or send video phones fighters and some hot mama turns

Even Adolfo for fun we missed effort rock on Bradley M cool Karen M sanli attempted a practical guide to compliance with the new GP a– let’s get started minecraft server only vegan vanilla and he is right so we have items we prepared to go all the way through

But do folks want a break there is a break with the other sessions because this is a double session because it’s a story we can do a break or not it’s really more up to the audience than it is to us mighty demon hunter abstentions so those who want to break are you

Comfortable with us saying we have no problem if you wander out and wander back in or are you worried about missing content is wandering out wandering back in at your leisure okay okay so those who want to break take your break when you feel like it

When you hear the noise in the hallway from the break feel free to wander out we’ll keep going and come back as you want yeah and our goal here is to try engage some sense from you all and I already see there are people in the audience who know

You know who you are I’m executive director of the software freedom Conservancy and Bradley is president of English technology one of the core activities of the service although by no means the majority of what we do is is working in detail compliance we represent we have

40 member projects that are a part of our umbrella enough profit [Applause] avoid any confusion my boss I’m having out Willie employee oh boy I’m allowed to keep my home copyrights on my software we’re told you should do as well on the jobs Karen would you like

To publicly for the record since we haven’t signed the paper and we’re working on so a lot of people here are familiar with various different GPL things and there are certainly people I would expect that are new to copy left and copyright licensing and GPL and it’s compliance and enforcement and there are

Experts in the audience too currently so I really want this to be valuable to all of you I think Karen does as well and I don’t think anyone who doesn’t know very much should be embarrassed in the audience I am a fan of popular culture and I’m reminded of this thing and the

Harry Potter novels and movies where – like spoiler alerts Harry decides to teach his fellow students something things that the teacher is not doing very well at and he says to them every great wizard start out as you are now a student as we are now as – and I

Certainly didn’t I check with my mother my first words were not complete in corresponding source code they were more juice so I don’t think that I was born knowing about copyleft so there’s no embarrassment to not know these things calibrate us a little bit does anyone hear the basic explanation of what

Copyleft is so copyleft is a essentially a hat copyright law I promise so now we do in fact have a confidence monitor so so we’ll get more into the details of copula but before we get fully started I want to let it right now especially if you’ve gone to my

Talks before and you know I’m a stickler for a whole questions till the end this is not a talk it’s a tutorial I used to teach high school and while you know I will try very hard not to treat you like my high school students which will be

Easy because none of you showed up under the influence of marijuana today like happens in my high school class quite often I will not confuse you with my high school students Kara and I both also taught lawyers how many can we ask how many people in

The room of lawyers if you’re willing to admit it Richard Fontana whom I know is a member of the master – number of the New York Bar did not raise his hand so there’s two lawyers in the room for those watching on sorry um well actually

We’re going to get into that in fact being being a little bit of both computer geek and that’s a I tend to say we’ll see this later in the slides that you should be a kind of a really guess copyleft and GPL and how it works you should be a professional in either

Computing or the law and an amateur in the other that’s really the best option you don’t actually need to be professional both but it helps to be a professional and at least one of those I think anybody’s got a patch merged upstream as a professional developer so

I think Mars is lower than having a lawyer so we’ll go off slides just put your hand up when you have a question or you wanna make a comment and like to them so you will get a mic Terrence Michael be taken deliver to you

We did try to get it there Mike but we’ll be stealing one apparently for another room which would be very rude so we didn’t do that so there’s a textbook that actually goes in the story don’t read the chapter the text we saw in last class but it is material pulled from

Lots of mommies in places that was freely licensed it helped explain what copyleft was and some kids but generally what free software is and why free software is has been merged into it it’s not a perfect murder so that you’ll see if you read it now it actually if you’re

If you want to contribute and you’re just a good copy editor they need that more than anything because things are different boys right and I wonder that this last point here that that we don’t mind if you tune especially since we’re gonna go over some basic stuff in the experts in the

Room if you want to pull it up while we’re talking the conference organizers have a wonderful network here and it’s text is fast to download so you should be able to download the PDF for a look at the HTML and feel free to peruse through it while we’re talking and if

You hit something in that text that sort of sparks a question and you want to put your hand up and just switch to that topic I think so we’re gonna go over some both simple and complex things I’ve both there and I have done long different formats of tutorials about the

GPL and so forth and and and my experience too long ago to teach a full-day course and I always felt that the full day was the only way to really get a full grip or copy and that was just when gplv2 was around so I think

It’s it’s difficult to do it to really get a full grasp in two hours so we chose we actually went back and forth of the organizers and sort of talked about how to narrow it and we’ve now heard a little bit more to the compliance side of GPL because that’s what people tend

To ask a lot about and get excited about but but we’re going to try to get as much key highlights as the Canon is which you would get in a longer course and as we said we can go in depth in different areas as the interest of all

He goes so the first thing we’re gonna start with is discuss kind of the motivations of GPL and why it exists and I think this is even those photos you they’re experts this material might be worth discussing maybe even a little more interactively because I think a lot

Of times people lose track of why GPL does what it does if you find that as well caring that people sort of forget it’s not just about some set of rules the rules were there for a reason yeah oh yeah we’ve got that yep and we’re gonna then pretty quickly turn to talk

Most about compliance with when we spend most of the time we have long compliance issues and if at that point you have an interrupted to ask questions which you should feel free to put your hand up and do we have a bunch of sort of real word

Examples at the end that we’re going to go over which it is based on questions with me jump ahead to at some point so so the reason I founded this yyu why should listen to us like why should you take our word for these things which i

Think is a good question that you should all ask yourselves and we’ll hopefully answer it yeah yeah and so so we have experience doing licensed drafting and the copyleft world we as part of compliance efforts often end up being de facto interpreters of the license at least for the member

Projects of Conservancy such a Samba Inkscape material and so forth and for those linux copyright holders who are associated with us and we do enforcement that’s something I used to but I think rules and I don’t want a world where no one ever gets in trouble when they violate I have a laser for Nike just pointed richer now look have you remember not dealt with a compliance issue in your job I guess you can’t say okay so we’re continuing Mike we were asking Richard Fontana conceptualizes where custom wire yeah so so we often teach tutorials like this to

Those folks which is what this point about someday we may be across the table from you because some companies do from time to time fail to comply with the GPL and if it’s a project that Conservancy is affiliated with we would be the people that you talk to when that

Happens our goal in doing a story let’s make sure that’s not so scary so I always include a discussion when I teach tutorials like this I think you do as well Karen about wide right a GPL exists in fact if you look at our tutorial text if you read that later you’ll see

There’s a large frontmatter about why software freedom why does the GPL exist well I just don’t feel freedom matter and the reason is is because I think too often people think of the GPL or copyleft generally as an end unto itself is if copyleft is a principle of its own

Copyleft is not a principle it’s not something to believe in in the way you might believe for example in software freedom the copyleft is a tool it is a strategy to maximize the for freedom I’ve seen the four freedoms on so many slides of this conference I’m not going

To go through them because I think it may have already been at least two talks that did that and I encourage you if you saw these people have read the GPL all the way through at some point yeah so about about three-quarters of the room

I’ve read the DPL all the way through so if you never read it before you can do this with completely fresh eyes but if you have read the GPL before I’d encourage you to read through it again with this in mind that each clause is designed rather carefully to make sure

That it works to defend the our freedom of users and that’s a way you can help yourself understand the GPL in the context in which it’s written right and I think it’s important to remember that from the earliest days the theory behind copy left versus non copy

Left was primarily on a spectrum of assuring software freedom versus gaining adoption and popularity of the software and I think it’s simplistic if you say it’s the copy left just cares about software freedom it doesn’t care about adoption and vice versa in fact many different copyleft licenses

Have been drafted including ones by the upset themselves different complex license different exceptions to make sure that for any given code base that trade off is done just right Karen and I we spent time library exceptions quite a long time drafting an exception specifically designed for GCC to make

Sure that GCC was making that trade-off so GCC is an example of a program that is not under just GPL v3 or later it is under GPL B for your later Plus this runtime library exception which implements some details of a trade-off between adoption versus all for free so

Carrie do you want to go a little depth on this part because you were talking about this before this is distorting the how details a copyright license so GPL talked about would you feel the copyright license I will not be an advocate in this particular characterization but copyright grants of

Monopolistic right over copyright or I don’t raise your hand if you want me to go through the spiel on basic copyright great gray uh-huh so so I think I basically covered and you also right and so the only point I want to make on this before we move on

Is that copyleft is basically a generalized concept there are many different copyleft licenses from many different organizations and the GPL is one specific implementation of a copyleft license to put it in more kind of computer yes and there’s a family of GPL licenses differently and those are all different implementations of

Different types of copy labs trying to go to that strategy and the way that it does that under copyright is it makes the permissions you get under copy levitt or conditional on some requirements so you all get since you represents my copper you already understand hopefully and raise your hand

If you don’t that copyright is restrictive it takes away permissions to copy and modify and distribute software and pretty much every regime around the world because of the Berne Convention and copyleft comes along and says well we’re going to turn back on your permission to do almost everything but

Make it conditional on certain requirements and I the reason the way I understood this the best when I was really studying this was if you go through the text of either GPL and look for the phrase provided that it appears quite a bit it’s constantly saying you

Can do this provided that you do this other thing so if you meet these conditions we give you a very broad license to do all sorts of things you’d like to do as long as you meet these in fact relatively minimal additional requirements yeah I think it’s wrong to

Think of those as restrictions I think there there are more qualifications on the permissions and I always like to carrots not you dependent slightly but I because I’m a crazy for yourself a radical type I always compare it to crazy I’m crazy so so I if you can line

A copy of GPL up against a proprietary license that you might get from say an Oracle database or something like that of course the GPL has requirements but the activities the gpo permits are completely prohibited under dietary licenses you may never copy modify or redistribute any proprietary

Software your penalties if you do any of those activities and the thing is is that GPL requirements are so minimal it’s sort of like well if you find them so important you can use proprietary software I think it’s gonna be more restrictive to you and it does however

Make it simpler because if you say am I allowed to do this because I get that we get the question all the time am I allowed to do insert question here with the GPL or with the GPL software the answer is sometimes yes sometimes no or yes provided that more commonly with

A brighter softer the answer is almost always no so you just know you’re not allowed to do anything and your life will be simpler you won’t get the advantage of GPL software but if you want a simple life using a lip fried-rice software it is available to

You i amended this vibe to also as this which is which is that there are many really powerful business reasons to be using copyleft that it’s not putting in as a dye economy false dichotomy but but there are we could do a whole day on why it’s good for industry to use copyleft

The forefront yeah and I see too many speakers bought fall into a caustic have a dichotomy for as I as a kind of a punchy I don’t actually think there is a dichotomy like the strict economy against proprietary and GPL software or even criterion free software there is

Nuance and complexity the reason that I make these points like this in this somewhat aggressive way I admit is because after decades of being told how restrictive the GPL is I’m just amazed because from proprietary license there’s so much more restrictive and I don’t hear people traveling up to every Oracle

Person they meet and saying your licenses what your restrictive yet I get that almost at every conference except for this one because everybody around here seems friendly to copyleft I would not do that to someone because I know what it feels like to be told you’re licensing but I’m

Glad it doesn’t happen to that person from Oracle who is here I hope it happens to no one so I think I think one of the toughest place this is and this is more for those who are more knowledge about the law than about software there’s a lot of technical you need to

Have to understand how to meet the requirements of the GPL and as I say before I don’t think it to be a professional on either side necessarily but it’s I think this whole thing about being a professional in one and on the other is where you have engineers

Partnering often is really interesting a lot of these three are the really key things that come up what source code is what binaries are and what methods of description distribution are most difficult for software the GPL is different that’s a the affero GPL which we won’t be talking about today because

The requirements of GPL generally more or less there’s some exceptions in some weird areas but as a general rule you can consider it triggers and I have to do lots of stuff upon distribution so understanding how software gets distributed and when is really important a great example of how this can get a

Little tricky is GPL JavaScript JavaScript is you shall we distribute it because when you go to a web page one of the URLs is the dot JS file dot JS file gets hit with an HTTP request and the JS file is copied onto your computer you have received

Distribution of the javascript file and people look at me strange when I say most people it’s all lots of a private area software all day every day and they don’t even know it and they say well why is that well because they’re going to webpages that install proprietary

JavaScript on your computer so if that javascript is yelled the requirements of GPL come into play when you put that JavaScript on your website whoops web page for people to so you want to you want to go up modification turn alright [Laughter] yes I guess you want me to say that that

Because you don’t like it so why don’t you like calling it that like the hook from copy web coming in to make the GPL work that’s the way I tend to explain it yeah what’s special about copy left particular we’re talking about is that going back to the freedoms almost all

The freedoms you you you get an are free to exercise without thinking too hard about it it’s what’s you start distributing that these providers that we talked about before come to play right so typically and this is a difference with the affero GPL they by the way the affero GPL is

Section 13 it’s key hook is on modified and things start happening when you modify affero GPL software but with GPL software generally the modifications you make privately on your own computer is actually been considered and copyleft an important thing to protect most of the time the trade-off was made in affero

GPL for other reasons but usually everyone consider it so the idea for a mandatory upstreaming as generally they consider antithetical to software freedom it you should upstream the course that’s a good thing to do but you shouldn’t be required just because you’ve now made one change on your own

Compared to Linux that you must immediately offer that as a patch on likes so the major requirements of copy laughter and lips are at least GPL time to kick in when you distribute that modified modified version but an unmodified version is just giving somebody a copy a little source code so

That’s usually pretty easy to meet anything for client yeah go ahead actually it can meet first my friend were you referencing a different version of GPL don’t match when I submit to the affero GPL yes so I’ll briefly explain that there have been various different modified GPL as the most famous one is

The lesser GPL the LGPL and that’s been around for a very long time it is a version 2 and 2 point 1 and verse 3 of that the affero GPL is yet another kind of licensing family of GPL licenses which is very similar to GPL v3 with a

Added component to require the network service freedom being here too ie if someone uses the network service they get the source code it’s a very complex topic and so we’re not going to cover it in detail today but the only reason I do run out during this slide is to point

Out that it is it’s different it’s one that’s different here so most of stuff on the slide is true of GPL and LGPL but not as true about fair and then there are two versions of the GPL that are final public affairs appeal was November

2007 right and do we so so a Alton turns out because modifying software is a technical activity uneven distribution has technical details about how it gets distributed like I talked about in the example JavaScript we end up talking a lot about technological details with the

Card to GPL so what what GPL requires is very it’s very detailed and requirements that generally engineers need to understand I think some of the earlier Because I go through and look a little bit at some of the requirements of GPL actually look at the details text so this is the key place in GPL version to that talks about permission to modify the software and again it’s always good to me detail in terms of why is it

Putting these requirements in our what software freedom principles are being focused on being upheld I left I almost don’t leave GPL v2 section 2a on the slide because it’s a very and that’s a good internet so for the recording personal the mic is funtime who helped draft

Gplv3 yeah it’s just not it’s not very important yeah so I mean I think the whole thing is a copula but the reason people have a tendency to say that I don’t know if it’s fully accurate but the reason people focus on this and tend to say that it’s because it’s the spot

Where it requires that your modifications so when you make changes to a GPL program the way the copyleft ends are fun the more fundamentally working is by requiring as part of your copyright permissions to be allowed to modify it at all you know I haven’t eaten yet otherwise ins your modified

Changes which are under your copy or your companies I’m not mistaken I think you said if you change it but it’s if you’re distributed right well okay here’s an intriguing question so technically speaking if you modify the software you have to license your copyrighted changes on the GPL but if

You never distribute them you don’t have to grant the GPL license to anybody else does that make sense there’s anything well I guess I was gonna say is that one of the most common questions that we get about this is like where what are these putters this on pack and one of the

Things that we can’t underscore you know is that is that many of the concepts especially the derivative work provision is kicks back to copyright law I want to point out here so the this has been a constantly confusing thing for people begin and I think I think I think it’s

In part because of that confusion would be the thing that’s not being charged for its license you can’t charge for the light you can charge for the act of distributing in fact later GPL will be – it even says you may charge 3-axis absurdity but look at this in isolation

The inter confuse the whole is important saying the whole that’s related to making sure my entire work including your changes your modifications are license and license has to extend it all third parties and that’s important because remember how the distribution chain of free software

Tends to work if you have a copy of the GPL program you probably didn’t get it from the original license or in fact if it’s a multi copyright work like Linux where lots and lots of people have contributed all copyrights on it you might get it from a distribution which

Got it from those contrary holders and there might be somebody between there that had integrated that distribution so the license has to pass all the way down to everyone yeah we have another question if you’re the original creator of product a new license as GPL and then

You decided I want a closed source it does just the license itself prevent you from then not being able to does it are you enforcing the license do you have to enforce the license upon yourself does that make sense yeah it makes sense see I get better in

My background I’ll never answer any questions so uh so if you’re the copy if you’re that’s the sole copyright holder you can license your work under any terms that you want going forward once you’ve licensed the work you’ve licensed it so that licensing that or that you know presumably wherever you

Distributed it that that licensing will still be good but you can also license it under other terms and if you make modifications if you’re the sole copyright holder then then you can make those changes with that with your modifications are very differently and those modifications made

May never have been under so so if that’s what you’re asking and this is one of the reasons why it’s advantageous from a community perspective and also from a cooperative corporations perspective to have more diversely held copyrights so that so that it prevents against coming had the best intentions potentially at

The beginning of their product birthday either got acquired or entertainment management or merely a slight change strategy sort of and the other thing I’d add today I lose I was when you were asking I was clicking through the forward to decides I want to see if I

Had this particular text from JPL on a slide I do not because it doesn’t come up at so much in compliance issues but the GPL license itself is irrevocable so once you grant a GPL license somebody by distributing a copy to them they still continue in perpetuity to have

Permission to copy distribute and modify the software under GPL it doesn’t speak to future versions if all the copyright holders as Karen said were to decide to switch to a proprietary license never release another GPL version that old GPL version would stand alone this has happened in seconds frequently the first

Offer that comes to mind is there’s a software called open STV it’s an open voting software it was GPL for many many years and the original author decided he wanted to sell it as a proprietary product and has net well not offer any licenses from his copyrights under you kill anymore but

People have now Forex version and continue you have many there are many active projects where yeah another years gone by since the late 90s but I don’t see someone something online about someone trying to revoke the new key Allen said going after people to try to get from the weak versions often get

Emails people have to believe my version I tell them no you do not wait wait for them to see you and if they sue you call me because from a corporate perspective I think one of the things that that were I think the point that Martin fing made it is

Already was that but for companies to know that they can collaborate together safely the DPL is a really good tool for that there’s a lot of initiative to have permissive licensing in this in these circumstances but what happens is you have to impose a lot of governance rules

That are imposed in another way thank you whereas with with copyleft like the GPL it’s built into the license and so this is the equivalent text in GPL v3 I don’t want to get too deep into this other than put up to show you there’s the place where I mentioned it doesn’t

Say that at no charge thing anymore because of its historical confusion people not understanding what it meant and it has it has slightly different requirements but there there general in the same spirit most of what you’ll find in gplv3 is clarifications and better understanding of what GPL v2 actually

Said in a more terse way which is why I can’t go because so long because it’s basically I think installment put together the list of all the questions people had asked him about little phrases in v2 and then wrote another second son to expand mother to words so

Gets bigger pretty quickly what Bradley was alluding to earlier is that the gplv3 process was a public drafting process and there’s artifacts that you couldn’t look at to see how that drafting process went including rationale documents that discussed some of the provisions and you can see how

The form is exchanged just having sent over the drafting process which is interesting so this is so the end of the GPL b2 section 2 which i think is important to look at one of the the complex concepts here that I think it’s important to point out is this quote

We’re going to talk a little bit more about combine works and derivative works and so forth the real world terms but as a conceptual matter I think the confusion people have often is the question of what’s the separate work and what isn’t and if it

Was a separate work and then I can bind it with the GPL to work and this paragraph is really important with regard to that and it dates what were these for the study but the basic idea is sort of doing a whiteboard if there’s so so if you have this work

This work with GPL Gorky right over here right and you may be over here writing your other work you know your work and over here it is yours and you’ve been writing it for years and years and years right and so so he’s trying to say well

That’s my work I can license any way you want absolutely you could go out and be licensing this work to the world are there any non GPL license all you want what GPL is trying to talk about here but I’ve got time what GPL is trying to talk about is when

You take this work combine it with this work and make a new work which I would call it G plus end write GPL is trying to talk about what the licensing of that work is it doesn’t really care what licensing options are available for work n over here it acknowledges the fact

That works solely under your copyright and you have no obligations to the world to license it under anything other than what’s permitted by copyright law but G is under the GPL so if you want to create G Plus F which is your choice you can choose not to but if you create the

Combined work of the two things GPL had things to say about what the licensing terms of G Plus n had their options are you can follow those terms or you cannot create that work there’s any questions on that because yeah I knew so does this depend someone on how that

G+ and obviously does but how that Jeep box and works like if that happens in let’s around example off like wordpress and wordpress theme and and maybe a thing that was originally applied to something about us to put in a proprietary CMS and then you make this theme word present distribute this theme

I only the only ever will be used together but they are also kind of separate entities and they only come into contact in runtime they’re not compiled together anything like that how then does the GPL affect well so one thing I was gonna say that my clarify

This is it if you have so you can continue to maintain n right where there’s no combination and you can continue G + N and as long as you maintain N and can continue just because you’ve created a derivative work of the of the two together doesn’t mean that

You can’t go right and so and so I I think another point I want to make it and be very careful I promise I won’t try Narayan so in this G + anything here right that that’s when I’m doing this example I’m sort of assuming that you’ve

Made the determination that G + n is a combined work I’ve done is a combined work so it’s not the GPL that dictates any questions toward the tutorial like this one for years and we usually freeze at this point because at this point everybody says but I need to know the

Answer to what a combined work is to know if I can do anything well I get that I used to be much more much more of a commodity commercially now so you can that’s what I used to be like but I just sort of be like well that’s your problem

You gonna figure it out these days I kind of understand why people are so frustrated because copy LEP’s goal was to take copyright as far as it can go to defend software freedom i’m attribute this to both Jeremy Ellison and Michael Meeks there were the first two people

Aaron say this so I think one of them invented this but they call it the judo move on surprise our software because it takes this powerful tool that proprietary software uses restrict you copyright and turns its force on itself apparently in you know that’s one of the biggest

Things you’ve learned as a martial art is how to take the attackers energy and push it back against and that’s what DPL is trying to do and do that it’s what’s caught us we call it a strong copyleft that phrasing is not the idea behind a strong copyleft which GPL

Tends to be is to stretch that judo move as far as it can under copyright but that means on the edges when people start disagreeing about what is or is not a combination when they look at D plus N and say is that really a combination or the only people sometimes

People would argue well all you did is take G down here and put G D and n happens to be on the same CD as G and they’re just sitting on the hard drive next to each other but otherwise no combination has been made there are situations that exist like that in fact

Sorry I going forward let’s go back that’s actually discussed in here about separate independent works right so GPL contemplates that copyright law is going to sometimes say things are separate independent works and sometimes it’s going to say they’re a derivative work but its goal is to say whatever

Copyright law tells us is the answer is how we’re going to go now what’s happened over the years is people have who have big copyright holders on copyright works and you mentioned WordPress in your question have had opinions and WordPress is a very strong opinion about what they believe I

Actually tend to agree with WordPress as I’ve read all their stuff and about about this issue anyway and they’ve come to conclusions of certain types of plugins and templates and themes and so forth our combined works and therefore the GPL word pressed the WordPress being

On the GPL there’s the G your theme is the ing Plus n is a there are people in the WordPress community will aggressively disagree with this and it is a debate and this is one of the largest debates in free software yeah I mean I yeah it’s I mean it’s a

You have copyright player I have been surprised how maximalist my country beyond copyright and I have been further surprised at how that maximalism has been exported to other countries and so as a u.s. copyright lawyer it’s hard for me to look at some of these questions

And hear the analysis that some of the in-house corporate attorneys make to make it sound like the what would be considered a derivative work is so much narrower than I imagined it would be looking at the case law as it has United States and I admittedly have very mixed

Feelings sharing works when maximalism happens but as Bradley said earlier you know it as as the copyright maximalists have further attraction that means that also copyleft that analysis has to be interpreted in the same way so looking at what WordPress has said or looking at what any other steward of code has said

About their license is useful and interesting but in some ways it must be taken with a grain of salt as you would imagine what and what a judge is going to say and I’m in Madagascar hands again but I’ve actually talked at length with Richard Solomon about his intent with

Regard to this and he always intended it it would stretch it would go as far as it could and that was part of the his design of the idea of copyleft was to basically as copyright law gets worse because none of us in the copyleft world really like how copyright operates and then

Extensions we get us and all those sorts of things but Stallman saw literally and said well that’s so bad that we’ve got to make sure we use every little bad thing it does against itself by making sure every bad thing that copyright law does we use the defense all for free

This is a complex area so I’m absolutely glad to politic grab hands up again of people who are waiting to ask stuff just the one okay mine’s distinct question relates to recent decision Oracle which held that Google was obviously a Google was making fair use Java API is for

Their Android operating system now taking that to its logical extent let’s say I’m producing a software package and written on them GPL license but I include GPL license take the ice what is there to stop me from arguing that well I need to I need those other guys in

Order to make use no I use those as api’s on the fair use because I’m using them to make a profitable product what’s to stop me from arguing that I don’t need to licensed under a Labour a license to work under a GPL license I’m gonna answer it ok you could argue that

But you might be wrong you might be and that that is tricky I would say it’s not Yelling wheeze your code more often than companies rather more often than in-house counsel are initially willing to evaluate yeah I don’t it’s not a compliance issue we did promise compliance which we should get to what about halfway through so I wanted to just point out I wrote a

Couple of blog posts about this and one of the key points that I made this blog post which you might find interesting to read is that the way this was reported in the media as of the inner question of our API is copyrightable the disconnect between what developers think of when

They say API and what the court and when they were using a similar phrases which they really don’t use the phrase API very much is very wide and I think also between developers when they say API so I sort of my blog posts like laid out the different things we might mean with

API and what the decision means with regard to that so I’d encourage you to read that I don’t want to get into too much depth oh that could work moving the solution Johanna is there any more questions on sort of this combined work thing that you really have no

Burning I’m happy to take them but I think people might be yeah in the particular example that was mentioned of WordPress and templates section deploy where it says do not apply to these sections when you just should be dentists if that works if they are not from the same web site and therefore

Distributed separately wouldn’t that then flying off hand about the technical ways that WordPress is distributed to be able to answer and I I mean I wonder how many people how many good the room want this to be a discussion about WordPress is compliance I I mean I don’t I don’t

Want to just work because we’re about halfway through and we haven’t gotten into in depth about compliance stuff we could talk we could be happily spend the rest of time talking about WordPress compliance we can pull up a statement on it we can get into technical details but I don’t know if we

Want to do that okay okay so mine Aries so binary off the binary or object code as it’s called gplv3 is really just a form of modifying the world right and it’s it’s a but it’s a process that you can do that causes the work to be

Obscured and this is been the biggest issue in free software to some extent because when you can give people only binaries or and I include the binary asteroid gplv3 talks about it things like meta 5 JavaScript or otherwise source code that’s not really source code because it’s been completely run

Through various processes it is a way that companies have kept people from being a little coffee share and modifying distribute their works so when you think of doing a binary do you think of well that’s actually a modification is the best way to go from my point of

View and I’m going to quickly go show the text gplv2 that talks about binaries and permissions that allow you to create binaries but then has requirements on how you do it when you distribute a binary to make sure that you get sources – this goes back to my stuff is up

Provide at that right this is one of those provided that communities made sure the source code is available to users you may distribute binary works it’s not the GPL ISM want you to get people binary which most goods need these tiles what’s that no doctor said either that ham be here I

Will just tell here I’ll be here in 20 hold on No bottom line so [ __ ] additional clap yeah oh my my but I get spied film 15 so you should be allowed to get binary forms but you must give them the complete corresponding source and we’re

Probably going to talk a lot for the rest of this tutorial about complete corresponding source that is really a central component from my point of view of where compliance matters gplv3 by the way calls that corresponding source and it’s a defined term it’s so it’s more proposed I think generally speaking

They’re roughly the same I don’t want to get too much into the debate of where how corresponding source and P to different verses but here’s the definition you want to take a look at it I encourage you to read both licenses and read the rationale documents which

Kind of Road watch parts of in fact much of the text in the tutorial about gplv3 is merged in from the rationale box and requirement said you had to license the whole work under GPL ooting such measures license part of the whole work under a license

Under GPL in fact of this means of the license that can sort of resolve to GPL like ultimately be GPL if you put them together and the license as the whole can be GPL things like the IFC license and other types of their permissive licenses you’re allowed to

Put that into GPL works because the ISC license allows you to realize them to work under lots of different licenses including proprietary ones as well as GPL but most importantly I have to give this thing called complete corresponding source or what GPL v3 just calls car planning so that as the center because

That is first of all the most emergencies yes I’m for free not bus akela in the lab site and also it is the most thing of interest to folks who are technical they want to be able to rebuild the software that’s the whole point when we often when we need to

Compliance it starts out as no sorcerer offer but very quickly it gets into each resource so does it start at the most important part of our and the reason that those any enforcement all is because of what’s called termination the licenses terminate upon violation so if you fail to give the complete

Corresponding source licensed under GPL and/or GPL compatible licenses you no longer have permission to do this it’s an automatic determination it just immediately happens and you don’t have any permission under to that permission needs to be restored there’s no built-in wage permission restored you have a lot

You had your license terminated and you must you must engage in some process to get that restoration which i think is actually a flaw with b2 that was corrected or improved upon and gplv3 gplv3 so so what termination is talking about is this license here is your permission

To do that to have downstream from your G+ and or in fact from Yugi if you want to distribute key by itself that goes away to now if you have this other separate independent work you can still be distributing that but you no longer wish to distribute anything that’s was

Cotton was licensed to you under the GPL copyrights it’s pretty it’s pretty strict right it we’re codes were one of these things we’re covering well so aggressive it it’s it causes you Gale to be aggressive on this point but the thing is is that the policy goal is not

Necessarily to make people’s life scary that their license is going to terminate when you hear quote employers surpri to fight about the DPL they’re thinking about all this termination thing is so horrible and scary but in the real world when you implement it your goal is to

Solve the technical problem so that they can have the rights your store to be able to do it we want people to be able to modify and rebuild the software so our goal anytime we’re enforcing GPL is to get to the point where people can modify and rebuild the software s/m

We’ve had reports in the past so we we’ve confirmed a violation and knowing that product is in violation still never never took procedures to for example pull products from the shelves that were in stores or anything like that or to shut down sales to work although you could under the license potentially and

Having community coursers like Conservancy there are others as well it’s a good way of making sure that there check out the system which still allows so one of the reasons why GT enforcement has become so much more difficult in the last last 90 years or so has been

Because the advent of invented system in the old days checking the complete carbonic source was correct with easier providing it was easier because there were mostly on something unix-like system or UDL where did we knows but it’s built on self-hosting systems and so forth uh and now it’s much more

Complicated and guinness it’s not – you have to take somebody some you know so we do enforcement we talk about whether this is complete correspondent source code complete corresponding source meets the requirements of GPL and the thing is is that if you’re if you’re doing stuff is the right kind of engineering way

You’re probably gonna be really close to being able to comply easily if you’re using version control you tag releases you make sure your build system works you don’t have someone new person who works for you who knows how to make the build and nobody else does that’s a

Really bad engineering kind of thing so if you void those engineering mistakes well then you have compliance because your build process is documented your source code is tagged to the release you put the source code together and you release it then you know how to build it

And you can tell the downstream how to do that yeah question so just a quick question on the build process here if you’re using build tools which are proprietary and and potentially have restrictions on distribution which which you don’t control how yes how does that well yeah

I’m jumping ahead because we do have a actually just we talked about that in a few minutes I just want to do a couple other things we actually I’m happy to what yeah yeah I I realize we I’m just speaking it’s some few slides ahead so I’m actually

I’m [ __ ] I’m gonna skip some of this part cuz I’m gonna get some major stuff so so so yeah here we go so the real goal with build scripts is to make sure that someone skilled in the art can build it and it’s certainly true that at times you have proprietary tools and

There is I really okay I’m just not gonna try to find a slide with it we’re gonna have a slide later and so that’s fine I was trying to get to but the basic idea behind the scripts used to put the control compilation installation which the gplv2 says is to make sure

That you’re giving whatever the mechanisms are that you you know to know how to build it it was never from my view and I’ve checked this with tolerance and tannin drafting and the GPL required to give you a third party thing that you also used so a great the

Easiest example to explain this is when you have a GPL program on Windows I am quite sure of GPL never intended that you would have to provide visual studio because it would be sort of a nonsensical answer because you wouldn’t be permitted to license Visual Studio under GPL and ship it downstream because

Microsoft wouldn’t allow that the software itself is not Visual Studio the software itself is whatever use part of the Visual Studio so usually what we’ve generally said and this is on the slide later that will tell you is to is to explain what tools you use and how to

Get them on the open market so if you say I use Visual Studio version a diversion foo well I if I want to be able to read no but I might have to go buy Visual Studio So certainly violators who have attempted to say that they’re there build scripts were proprietary and we said no because GPL says those scripts used to control compilation the question is what’s the tool where’s the script I think my view of this is basically that you’ll have a difficult time saying

That’s something that is you’re basically a few if you if you write some tool specifically designed to build this thing as a way of getting a competitive advantage to get around the GPL which I’ve seen done that’s pretty dicey area to be in if it were a tool a great

Example is this there’s compilers out there that are so expensive they’re not there on the open market but they’re not it’s interesting question I don’t think that just because the compiler costs a million dollars means that you have to and this really mattered right like this really matters for the because it can

Frustrate the underlying aims of the GPL of using copyleft at all for example many people are relying now on copyleft for security reasons and being unable to build the software means that you don’t have any advantages of coffee less if you can’t possibly fix a problem when

It’s there so it’s you know it’s not I think writing something on the other hand if the tools are available or generally they would be in this particular situation we could imagine all kinds of extreme situations but if it’s a it’s available and can be reproduced by a third party that’s what

Really matters so yeah yeah so you don’t want to so basically every every chip that you buy they’ll shoot their own compiler with a set of libraries attached to that but the compiler will have conditions like you’re only allowed to use this good pile up on our tubes not mine gave me

The news or see your desk turn on preexisting the great mantid NDI an agreement to choosing their own chips if that’s the case quite honestly that was indeed the the norm ten years ago and beyond there are certainly chips today that are still in that situation if you

Buy but certainly in the embedded if you’re using chip star in the embedded Linux class that’s basically gone now if you’re going to excuse the DSPs and so on and so forth yes you’re still in that world but you’re not on those platforms at that point as a result now there are

Smaller more open options are tosses this other sorts of use there but nonetheless there are chips that you can get that don’t have that problem and certainly all of my friends that are engineers and embedded and and copyleft supporters and so on and so forth they

Choose not to use the chip that you’re talking about and usually that the the cost difference is minimal we have your service what would happen if I could polish GPL this other night and I face an enforcement action and we got into a disagreement about this right I mean and

That’s and that’s the kind of things that are happening I mean we haven’t mentioned the VMware lawsuit that we’re in I mean but that is an example it’s not exactly worse there the crystal saying that we haven’t we as a community Christophe has filed a lawsuit in germain against VMware which is

Currently on appeal with the German courts and that lawsuit is about of situation not this not a situation in any way with details similar to the ones you’re asking about but a situation where a company said the GPL doesn’t require us to do this Kristof disagrees and he’s decided to go

To court to get action many of these things that are very complicated where people are trying to test the edges of GPL ultimately someday they will end up in court it’s it’s kind of funny that my my talk here last year which some of you may have seen became this thing that

People are obsessed with because I made that rather and controversial statement I think that eventually things will get tested in court because two people have a dispute for my point of view I’m glad Christophe is out there doing it rather than to third parties fighting we’ve had

Many suits over GPL where two third parties who are not interested in the community are fighting over GPL will get case law decided about what happens with yes that interpretation of the GPL will be collateral damage for the two companies fighting it out for gets a

Little bit more money in the end and having this community process where which were I guess we’re gonna get yeah yeah the principles now survive oh great good so so so a Conservancy we follow some stated principles of GPL enforcement we published and and what we

Did was we tried to codify the friendly ways in which we do enforcement so that we can bring we’re not doing so we wanted to put that in principles in writing so that companies that we approach for the first time maybe had you know really don’t understand free

And open-source software would would see them straight away and we’d see what they were you know what they were interacting with and also provide a way to codify some of the things that have been accepted practice you know in the field of GPL enforcement in a principle

Than community driven way so so we published those principles and they’ve been very very useful in sort of explaining that and and they talked about various different things that we try but the most important thing is we try to get in touch for the company when they violate

And try to communicate yes are we as we say in the principles that a company that is a violator now is tomorrow’s contributor don’t meet them as anything else is is deeply problematic and not any interest so free software in the long term and the goal of course when

We’re looking at a specific GPL enforcement action is to get that product into compliance I am I talked yesterday during whether the mini comes a few people we’re glad to hear this and then I’m not talking about it this way the GPL is a license for users I think users are important I

Like when people have code upstream I like what I’m seeing developers are happy but I got in this because I was a computer user and I care what happens to me as a user and I don’t think we should toss them aside I think the only way

They’re gonna be able to do that is if they can hack the devices they have right I became a developer because while it was proprietary software it was it was so editable it was barely compiled assembly on my Commodore 64 I modified that software now I was technically

Violating the license and when I learned later what licenses were I thought this is great I want permission to modify so that I can become a hacker on the device that I have in front of me so I’m going enforcement is getting these CCS candidates to work actually in terms of

Heckuva Linnet mashaykhina name crackers in my esteem so i’m subscribed as i said the Stute roof is a nice design it’s an on-air name hackers on the phone hacking around and it’s escorpion zephaniah bite and Xenophon who communicated is in term guard if a vendor and defend Roman zone

Location today exist under Fela why doesn’t he attack me as a Nissan is a good item from from hacking listened as a side of a scooter Atticus Anka means thank you to the Santa’s as it was that should be fairly useful ended I went in to see Adama house watch them hitting

The vinegar and spanking University this is money just being faced into Santa’s it isn’t we also try to make contact in like the nicest of all possible ways – I’ve tried to find the right person and to not escalate but ultimately lots of times we have to we have to we wind up

Sending a letter to weaker will add a company because that’s the only way to get attention ultimately and then we have to deescalate in order to get the process rolling in order to actually have source candidates go back and forth and in the ideal world we would tell

Somebody when we finally find that right contact we would tell them we’re gonna violation get us the right source code and they would give it to us but we don’t live in out of your world I had a situation where we did 22 rounds of reviewing source code release and

Sending the back problems and getting another one excetera etc I think the best I have gotten twice I’ve gotten the first source code release was correct and they my view completely comply with the GPL and the average is around 8 I calculated that what’s been a couple

Years since I calculated that but it’s still probably right around there I mean if you’re here or if you’re watching this tube real then I think that’s sort of like the first step so you know that if if if we contact you is that we’re engaging in this process in that weird

Our goal is yes a lot of times we have this process and the companies don’t really understand our motivations are and our goal is to to delay us as much as possible to introduce all of this away and and keep us spinning our wheels thinking that eventually we’ll give up

Or we’ll take we’ll take a buyout pay us off but but when we we slowly a methodically go back and forth and evaluate each of the source candidates until we finally get to the point where we’re comfortable with that source candidate so I think we’re down about 10

Or 15 minutes right on the clock roughly that somewhere around me are we doing one more time how much longer 2500 25 that’s great I was getting Mike my oh well you know what I started my timer when we were setting up the Mike and I

Ran so this is really wonderful to just by speaking through like I should we now have a nice time for us to you know it’s these are the kinds of things we sent so we get one of these source candidates and we try to build it like that we’re

Actually trying to get real compliance we’re actually trying to make sure that we have this mindset that if the person went on the open market bought this device got the source code candidate would they be able to build and install the software from the source code they got and the answer is usually

No and we don’t want to just any very early on all business Waverly on we used to do this leg it doesn’t work like we have a binary answer and we quickly realized in GPL enforcement world but that was counterproductive because the goal is as Karen said to get them to be

Contributors just showing them how to do a is something akin to a reproducible builds for their thing is not only going to make their engineering better but it’s going to make the GPL compliance but the problem is the other day about how these companies sometimes have a single build machine or

They have all sorts of horrible engineering practices such that they actually and we just figured this out they never actually said this I don’t think anybody’s ever actually said this but it’s very obvious they’re reverse engineering their own software on the other side because they’ve lost source

Code they the key team has gone elsewhere so the first thing we find is we try to build it and there are no build instructions there’s no whatsoever so this is a text that we often because I realize but it’ll be really helpful for folks in

House companies to sort of take a look at this and see if they can it’s what they’re doing it meets up with our expectations going back to the US I get to Saturdays because I lost a Sunday on the way back I have two Saturdays to do

This you’re just so lazy so when you do contact a company or you know someone who you want to bring into compliance what is the sort of communication that you provide them with what how do you communicate your expectations yeah well I know it varies widely depending on who

It is and how we get in touch with them if it’s someone who’s really active who and I’m caffeinated I’m not allowed to have caffeine because of my heart conditions I like to ask so if we are able to to find a contact for example if

The company is one that is active in a free software space so people are present at conferences it’s very easy for us to make contact when we know that one on one it’s usually a lot easier and so then we can say oh you know that product you’ve fallen out of compliance

Let us you know let’s have a discussion and depending on the reaction that we have there it can go quite smoothly sometimes in those few instances that Bradley mentioned two of them uh you know compliance was within two weeks in one instance right like so so so in that

But many other times we try to make contact first we search you know like is there a representative from these companies who has been a speaker at any conference we can identify right so if we get to the point where we can’t find someone and we’ve sending a letter to legal then

The first conversation runs a legal contacting us and us having a conference call where it’s like you know all hands with you know like where everybody’s lawyered up and sometimes the companies we’re talking to have an internal and external legal on the call and sometimes no engineers so it’s a matter of like

Explaining you know we’re we’re you know and the principles have helped us a lot in this instance and the additional material we published because we can point to it okay so so we’re actually really friendly people and we promise we’re not your tools or anything like that we are interested in compliance and

Eventually it sinks and then we had a really hilarious call with one violator where legal just kept making us wait and they were really late and and their engineering staff was on the line waiting for legal to come for like ten minutes and so we’re having conversation

I keep saying don’t say anything I’m you know I’m a lawyer I think Tony Saburo general counsel was on the call don’t would say anything that is part of a negotiation your legal counsel is not here we can talk about the weather and so they’re like what you’re not check we

Were just looking up Conservancy it seems really cool and I was like well Conservancy it is you know we’re now profit and we do this down it and they start looking into it and they’re like yeah oh we’re out of comply don’t say anything but so it really it really

Depends on you know who we contacted what that’s like so so so this is a kind of example of what often a first CC answer for what I’m saying then we give us sometimes just the upstream in cases where they obviously got the list from us of software and then they

Searched online and went to our own projects website so I went to the busybox website and got the busybox source for that fish on one son’s match but yeah so so one of the things we do is we try to make guesses and we the

Reason we do that is if we just tell them doesn’t work so we actually try to build it and get into various different details this is another example of things we kind of try to guide them to something more reasonable as far as how they put their source release together

We really encourage them to put some sort of overarching readme and explain what’s going on as far as what they’ve given and this is an important point about scripts the GPL GPL B 2 says you must include the scripts used to control compilation the installation of the executable a lot of times developers

Read the word shell to be in that text as if all the scripts are just the shell scripts it’s English it’s not technical writing it could mean any type of script for example if you ever seen a play there’s a script for a play and if the

Way that you have to build something if someone has to act out a bunch of parts they have to type a bunch of things on the keyboard themselves and remember what shakes mewling which is this turret so you’re gonna have to write down what the person has to do it doesn’t have to

Be a shell script in fact I’ve had this big long read these that say do this then do this then you know doing some random thing yes they usually start with like fine red hot seven for many many years that would be standard tank people

Built on up until like the mid 2000s now right it said it by the way I think was under wise in 97 follow them to the letter right they say go find right at seven we actually have a bunch of at one point a couple years ago we found Isis

For the oldest distributions we could find it’s actually really hard there’s no good archive of those we have some the 30-man but but yeah we went in found them because if somebody says you have to have rent at 7 installed ok that’s part of the bill that sort of goes somewhat

To your question if they say we got to find out at 7 we can’t fire it at 7 that’s too bad you know for us because if they say you have two brunettes having to make it billed we better be able to find it but we do really require

Those kinds and we try to refer them to our guide so this is so this is a shortened URL that goes to the copyleft guide the specific section of it so we try to give them examples of how we do this now you start to see this over and

Over again and you know how it’s going to go and you know as I said before that they probably don’t even have their own sources and so forth so you see things like this you know and it looks really suspicious we really actually I don’t read these reports anymore because I’m

Too jaded my colleague Deborah Gingrich does he’s much friendlier a nicer person to me so he tries to write them again an exuberant helpful way which maybe I could earlier in my career do that but I certainly can’t now because it’s painful but there’s examples like this where

This is this thing in samba and they said oh you know the source release will include the source code for samba and then we requested that source release from the company and they gave us sources that didn’t have samba so well that was a mistake but probably not

There’s this goofy thing that happens colleague corpses named Brett Smith actually brought one of the first programs to unarchive archives of archives of archives of archives I I think the longest deepest I ever had to go with the CCS check was 8 down I opened 8 rdz files inside each other

Inside the rock pile was two rock files at a target GZ file man it goes deeper it goes deeper yeah so we try to sort of explain to them do it and a lot of these things I want to point out like if this actually works we

Open all this stuff up and it builds it’s not like the GPO requires that you’re not put tar.gz files inside at our phones tonight at our files inside of Cynthiana file inside of a rar file as I’ve seen there’s nothing GPL says you can’t do

That but our goal is not just to make them just you doing the bare minimum you know cuz do you really want to just do the bare so it’s true that we often just get minimum compliance from my clients is binary really you cross the line but

If you just sort of like walk around finally get past line into compliance that’s unfortunate we want these companies to become upstream you do that so yeah I mean we’ve had I actually sat in a lecture at a conference where a lawyer independent where was advising people to like hide the GPA notice

Somewhere and within the product so that people wouldn’t see it but it was still technically compliant and that sort of it it not only frustrates sort of the attention of the license but it also really starts to minimize the benefits oh yeah I and I by the way I’ve seen the

Nesting doll version of offers – I’ve seen oh yeah yeah inside a word file that refers to a text file that’s in three directories down and in hidden directory there’s a text file that then tells you to go to the website and then the website has this weird URL that’s

Not linked to for anywhere else that has the office resource which technically that’s compliant you know if I have to chase a rabbit hole to find the source code as long as I find it it’s probably compliant but is it the right thing to do that’s a question we do actually it’s

Very technical so so we actually try to be a build engineer and do it Denver is has expertise in building software for embedded devices and that’s why he does these CCS checks for us these days it’s not as if you have to teach people how to build software it’s not that we

Should you you can certainly assume it’s reasonable to assume people will know what to do with those scripts my view has always been someone skilled in the art of building software 4minute systems should be able to build it if if somebody gets lost and we ask questions

There have been times when they told us this is easy to figure out you should better figure out we’ve said okay that’s fine we’d like to put in the readme since we figure it out anyway and it’s helpful but you’re right if we if we were confused it’s now figured out

That’s fine yeah let me try really hard before we you know when we try to build it the first time we Denver goes through a lot of contortions to try to get it to build yeah I don’t want to wait we don’t want to waste anybody’s time so everybody knows what’s happening here

Right if they use the cross compiler that’s not fair but they didn’t have to give us the cross compiler now there’s nothing that says if we were talking about before they don’t want to give us this compiler and we understand that but we have to know the right type of

Compiler to use and so we have really focused and this is looking for so so it’s it’s important that we know how to get the right tool chain right and I think something like this is pretty adequate abroad landlady told me yesterday this is not adequate so okay I

Understand that I’m just trying to get the flavor of the kind of thing we’re looking for we’re not asking them to give us a copy of the tool chain because the fact of the tool change GCC they can do what’s called a meta violation which we’ve seen which is where an attempt to

Comply with the GPL they gave us a big tool chain kit which itself violated the GPL we don’t want that to happen we don’t want them to end up in that scenario because when it happens they get confused and think that we’re tricking them but and I’ve had

Situations where and we now write our reports this way and say you do not need to give us this tool change just tell us what tool chain it is to be clear you may give it to us but you do not need to do it to us because people it’s like

Well we’ve been given proprietary software that we’ve sent back and said no that is proprietary it is not required under GPL and we never want to see it again thank you but it’s I think you want to make this as easy for users so we tend to guess at what compiler to

Use across pool Angie is a great project that’s like one of the most important projects and GPL compliance work because that’s very in Jesus of dethphone right therefore net critic lots of different because they probably used one that was generated at some point was either across the litany or Kingdom code

Sorcery is thought with two places where the most common so we try the ones we think it in we think it might be and then we try to explain what we tried so they understand like we got a lot of work to try and find that out now this

Is something that in this case temper figured this out like what was going on it’s pretty obvious to anybody and now in my point of view the fact that this is so trivially easy to figure out I didn’t think this is a GPL violation onto itself right if this were the only

Problem we had the report I would report it as well it technically complies because we know exactly what to do pretty quickly so we sort of say he really should fix this except the executable bit but but it it’s something where if we figured it out what we’re

Trying to do is offer them patches to their own build system and so it’s very common for installation instructions to be missing people miss the fact that GPL B 2 says those scripts used to control compilation and installation where they argue that installation doesn’t mean installation so so it’s required to be

Able to put the thing on the device and install matters because that’s the whole point of software freedom is the ability to modify the software and to make use of your own modification improvements for yourself and for others so these are all examples of from an apparent early

Realm ccs report so this is a problem when it’s really in a bad state we’re gonna move on to a couple other examples there other such things this is the problem that comes up a lot where they actually give you a bunch of source code that has kind of object code floating

Around and weird directories and the build system is not actually building the source code so if you run you run the build instructions they gave you and you know quickly it says we’re done and and it’s suspicious right because it’s like well what’s happening here don’t

You do a clean process did they give me all their object code already built is that why it was so fast or what’s the deal it doesn’t actually work if I do it make a clean or that bare equivalent and try to rebuild it and there’s their

Stuff miss it so in this example there was stuff missing right so there’s this path that’s there that’s supposed to be there and then we discover wait a second we did the build process and we got linux with absolutely not that code it’s about Kenny Vaccaro Falls whatsoever

Now in the old old days I used to build a truly monolithic kernel with no loadable modules I don’t think anybody actually does that anymore ok so it could be the case so here’s a good example so so bansa dependably sometimes do so it could be the case that we’re

Gonna get an answer to this report it says well actually we built the model in the kernel that’s why I didn’t see any duct tape off but if we got that answer we would say just show us where the model of the cruelest where you’re good

To go you can build that’s not against the GPL here’s another another interesting example so this is think this is a fairly old one that the particular example is for many years ago it became very obvious that they had this is a version number they had added

Themselves and they gave us their own version number was 1800 and the version in the firmware was newer so in the firmware we found these that has some files all of which are LTP access these are all LGPL libraries and the version number doesn’t match now it could be the

Case that they have a script that when they build it at the very end they change the version number on the binary so it doesn’t match the version number in the source theoretically possible I’d never heard of any engineer I never why they would so we figured

They had given us actually the wrong source code they gave us or it’s good for an older version possibly just accidentally this is why generates the CCS reports so we’ve had situations where and this is actually from the 22 round one there was a period in the mid

The mid-teens where we kept sending the same report over and over again because the same problems happen every time because if they weren’t and so this was the case where they had like two copies of the same library and my redacting makes a little weird cuz i have this

Thing called that live because okay let’s find the wrong one get rid of the wrong woman see if i can build the right one and maybe the right one can be moved to where the wrong one was maybe it all work so he did a bunch of stuff and say

They got a little a couple of things working in fact i think this little piece of we actually got added to their build script they have it is code to the build scripts so that it worked and and yeah so so that way then he finds up but

No if I do that install and installs website so you do install it ends up in the right place that’s great okay it all works one of the frustrating things is that as we have these rounds we find more and more things as they provide the correct when they accuse us of moving

The goalposts because we’ve asked for a set of one things the first time and then in subsequent rounds we ask for more things but it’s because we had no ability to know what questions we had to ask because we didn’t provide the right things so it’s frustrating for any cost

Counsel I think in particular to understand the fact that sometimes as the source code is provided as it should have been at the beginning we’ll discover things that we would have otherwise found if the source code had been full as full as they have had it at the beginning yeah and we actually

Denver wrote this text which I know we’re talking about like I think if it goes the end of the CCS reports you write it this is the best we could do with this current version we expect we’ll find more issues once we can get further along the process and be able to

Raise other issues with you so I want to end with discussion which is we start looking around in the source candidate and we find that there is missing source code so we’ll just tell them hey look these things and they’ll do all sorts of things like put them in weird places and

Actually once once we did what this is actually not this example but there was another example where we complained to them that they didn’t have the source code for the spec hair bulb and explained that they’re you know they’re the G+ and even if they wrote and I care

About themselves when they combined it with Linux and distribute the results it was a single combined work and this licensed under GPL and we said well you have to give us the source code for those and then the next candidate what they had done is they’ve taken the dot

Cairo files and copy them to the source directory edited the make file does to have a target that said copy the Cairo file to the install directory and told us they’ve now provided the source code for the ko pause because they were now in two places they were in the source

Directory as binaries and so this is the is the last thing I have on the side I’m not sure where time and I’m for allowed to go into the break but one other thing we do a lot is we we look at how the offer for source is working because

That’s an important part in this particular case the vendor would update the firmware over-the-air which is a new distribution there’s a new copy being given and in fact it’s the same one with the eighteen hundred of the point two hundred over there and so it’s an example where you

To remake the offer for source and make sure that they have an awful resource for the fun way they’re not running and so we had asked them we really wanted to see how to do this and we’ve actually had a conference call with them and we decided how we would how the offer

Source be presented for users yeah I can’t underscore enough how including the source with the distribution if you could possibly can do it will save you serious heartache later two minutes left so this is an example of asking for four and I love data I deliberately changed the day to today

Okay or to yesterday now I just said it was made it worse so but yeah so it’s no it’s totally recent okay actually change it from last week to this week okay yeah so this is so the reason I’m confused as contemporary uses text because the situations come up again again but this

Is the case where we’re asking for a firmware a correct firmware which to compare and this is not something that they they don’t have to give us another copy of the firmware we receive distribution by buying the product sometimes it’s hard to extract the firmware image off the product the

Problem then becomes we we get more suspicious because now we see things like oh there’s no files and then we don’t really know does the firmware really is the model of the kernel in it or is it not we don’t know and so we often ask people to give us the firmware

Which after all we need to test installation there have been times when installation made reconstructing the firmware image and especially if you have crypto lockdown which which sometimes happens with regard to you might not be able to test the install directly up the device without a crypto key now we don’t require that

They give us the crypto key gplv2 does not require that but we do want to be able to reconstruct the firmware image at least get that far and even if we can’t install that firmware image because that’s the definition so we often ask for a firmware image to do

Comparison so that we can verify that it’s in compliance and they sometimes resistant we try to work around it they don’t have to give us more stuff but they weren’t already required to give it’s the same thing yeah do the best we can okay so so where

We love to take more questions I know it’s going to break can we be fuzzy with that or do we have to get out of here is it possible for the original license or owner of the GPL license to transfer that to another person to continue on or

Do you have to become do you have to continue as a fork so to speak on that project you could assign your copyright to somebody else so for example if if you assign your copyright to somebody else and you would in fact hold the copyright for the entire project then

Then you can assign that to somebody else do it a number of things with it and then if the new person becomes the entire copyright holder they can but if you’ve got a more commonly if you have a multi health did you have a question so here’s some contact information I hurt

You to take a look at the guide if you want to care and I are both here progress of the company so we’re around to take more questions in the hallway and so forth we are having a match right now so if you’re in the home notice often canola

Noise we don’t give them the steno I appear to us I’m commission how about it’s Virginia next me under sanctions to end on um you know least I’ve seen what’s in an excellent photo media