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SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

 2 years ago
source link: https://lwn.net/Articles/926330/
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SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

[Posted March 16, 2023 by corbet]
The Software Freedom Conservancy calls out John Deere for failure to comply with the GPL and preventing farmers from repairing their own equipment.
This is a serious issue that goes far beyond one person wanting to fix their printer software, or install an alternative firmware on a luxury device. It has far-reaching implications for all farmers' livelihoods, for food security throughout the world, and for how we as a society choose to reward those who make our lives better, or stand in the way of empowering everyone to improve the world.
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SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

Posted Mar 16, 2023 17:01 UTC (Thu) by Funcan (subscriber, #44209) [Link]

Why not going the usual IP enforcement rope and ask for an injunction against the import or sale of all infringing items? That should get some attention pretty quick. The fact that every enforcement body insists on a softly-softly approach means there's zero downside to ignoring the GPL

SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

Posted Mar 16, 2023 17:18 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yep. Killing Free Software with kindness. Written about that elsewhere: https://paul.jakma.org/2009/12/21/killing-free-software-w...

SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

Posted Mar 16, 2023 22:16 UTC (Thu) by faramir (subscriber, #2327) [Link]

For some very noteworthy GPLed projects, major developers have publicly expressed multiple times that legal action should be the last thing done. To me at least, it's not clear if any level GPL violation would warrant legal action for some of them. Large projects tend to have many developers and not all of them are as reluctant to take legal action, so there are developers who could act as copyright owners to bring legal action for copyright violation; but at least in the case of the SFC, it seems like they want to follow the 'consensus' of the developer community which often means no action all. Thus the resorting to public shaming or no action at all.

The Vizio case mentioned by another poster, is an attempt at legal action without copyright owner involvement based on the GPL being a contract that individuals can sue for enforcement without developer involvement in the case (i.e. end users have enforceable rights as well as developers). Or at least that is my understanding of the Vizio case.

SFC: John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

Posted Mar 16, 2023 20:19 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

anyone knows what is the status of the Vizio case?

report

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