There's a real cost here. I'll happily agree that it's outweighed by the benefits that using Linux brings vendors, and that in the long run having infrastructure that does the right thing is probably going to be better in a bunch of other ways as well. But using BSD would avoid all of that, and so copyleft software needs to continue to demonstrate that its benefits outweigh those costs.

I dot my i's and cross my t's on licenses, and it boils my blood sometimes to see other people who don't. I can't tell you how many time people have failed to followed a simple CC-BY license correctly. The GPL-2 requires, by my understanding, that if you ship the Linux kernel, you have to ship your particular configuration code to build your specific kernel, not just generic kernel source. Every time you ship a binary patch, you have to update your source code availability to include the version of the kernel you used for that patch and the configuration code you used. The GPL-2 gives no exception to shipping all source code or providing a written offer, except for non-commercial distribution; in theory, even if you're basing it on a particular version of Debian or Red Hat, you still need to provide source in lieu of pointing to their source repositories. (That is likely to be a difference between doing it right and doing it good enough.)

In any case, the GPL 2 is going to require, for every binary patch, that you have a system for making sure you're posting correct source along with it. That's an real cost.

I also see a difference here between FSF copyright assignments and Linux's lack thereof. For all the FSF copyright assignments are a pain, as a company, I would know who they are, and I would know how they work, and if there's some license requirement we were having problems with, I'd expect a polite note from them to start. If we were honest about trying to comply, I wouldn't be worried the FSF was going to sue us. With Linux, you can get sued in random jurisdictions by copyright holders with distinct interpretations of the license and distinct tolerances for (possibly debatable) deviations from that.

They did? I recall the WRT54G I had back in the day was MIPS, as was the follow-up 802.11n ath9k router I got. Current one is ARM, though.

Posted Oct 21, 2021 3:00 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Posted Oct 19, 2021 23:06 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Mine leads to https://www.roku.com/en-ca/separatelylicensedcode which is also a 404. But if I explicitly change it to en-us, then it works for me. The actual code is hosted on Box.

Posted Oct 20, 2021 0:41 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

SFC files suit against Vizio over GPL violations

Posted Oct 20, 2021 11:25 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

Sorry, you're right, I should have clarified that I was speaking in more general terms (i.e. "this *usually* does not constitute insider trading, because...").

I don't think the Nacchio Qwest case is comparable. Joseph Nacchio was a CEO who lied about whether his company was going to land an important contract. He was in possession of material information (specifically, that he was lying) and traded on that information.

Here, the most you could argue is that the legal risk from misuse of open source software wasn't clearly disclosed in their S-1, or that the threat is more immediate than the disclosure implies. Given that the SFC lawsuit seeks no damages, and that Vizio's competitors are clearly capable of operating while disclosing modifications to open-source libraries, it seems hard to argue that the company is in much danger.

I agree in general that rule 10b5-1 does not protect an executive against charges that they traded on the basis of material nonpublic information if they learned that information prior to creating the trade plan.

Posted Oct 20, 2021 6:32 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

Posted Oct 20, 2021 15:10 UTC (Wed) by jebba (✭ supporter ✭, #4439) [Link]

SFC files suit against Vizio over GPL violations