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% The What and How of GPL Violations % Bradley M. Kuhn & Karen M. Sandler % Tuesday 9 May 2017

What's a GPL Violation?

  • GPL (both v2 and v3) require:

    • The whole work licensed under GPL.
    • (which means all copyrighted material added must be under GPL-compatible licenses.)
    • Complete, Corresponding Source (CCS) of that work provided, under GPL.

  • The licenses terminate upon violation …

    • … thus failure to comply means lost distribution rights.
    • … enforcement uses this rights termination as leverage to restore compliance.

Enforcement is Technical

  • Copyleft's policy goals related to technical acts.

    • modifying, building, and installing software is a technical process.

  • In embedded systems, this process is rarely straightforward.

    • GPL's requirements are strict.

  • In enforcement, we talk about “the CCS adequately meeting GPL's requirements”

Compliance-Friendly Development

  • Use revision control ...

    • ... to pull in vendor branch.
    • ... to tag releases.

  • Avoid "Build Guru" ...

    • ... by documenting build process.
    • ... and versioning it, too.

GPL Binary Requirements

(v2 § 3, v3 § 6)

  • Four options:
    • Source alongside binary (v2/v3).
    • Offer for source (v2/v3).
    • Internet side-by-side distribution (v3).
    • Torrent distribution (v3).

Source Alongside Binary

  • Simplest option

  • Obligations end at distribution time.

  • Physical media required.

Offer For Source

  • Useful if not shipping media already.

  • Lasts three years.

  • Mail fulfillment required (not in v3).

Side-By-Side Distribution

  • Not in GPLv2, pedantically speaking.

  • Always been considered compliant for v2.

  • v3 clarifies this.

Peer-to-Peer Distribution

  • v2 obviously couldn't consider this.

  • v3 allows distribution of equally seeded source and binary.

Preparing Corresponding Source

(v2 § 3, v3 § 1)

  • Make sure all sources are present.

    • revision system helps a lot here.

  • Build scripts

    • make sure someone skilled in art can build it.

Termination

(v2 § 4, v3 § 8)

  • v2 is automatic and permanent.

  • v3 has auto-reinstatement.

    • 60 day self-correction timeout.
    • 30 day penalty-less after notice.

  • Usually, you need copyright holder to reinstate.

Actual Enforcement

The "Rounds"

  • Ideally (it's only happened to me twice) the first source release is perfect.

    • but we don't live in an ideal world.

  • The worst we've ever experienced is 22 rounds.

  • We send detailed reports.

More Info / Talk License