FSF GNU GPL Conference
Friday I attended the Free Software Licensing and the GNU GPL conference at Stanford’s Law School (mentioned in my previous post.) It was a very good conference. It struck just the balance I had hoped in that it was not just on the obvious basics of the GPL and it was also not in the stratosphere of legal mumbo-jumbo. I learned several things I didn’t expect to and Prof. Lessig’s lunch time speech was inspiring, of course. I got a free Creative Commons T-Shirt. It says, “Some Rights Reserved” on the back. Nice.
One thing I was struck by were the number of attorneys there from the big software companies. IBM, Oracle, Sun, etc. sent lawyers there. You get the impression from all of these people that they are deadly serious about Linux. This is not some garage-based geek project that will whimper out of existence any day now. Billions of dollars are on the line so far as these folks are concerned and they are behind it 100%. The FSF guys realize this too. They aren’t going to compromise their principles one jot, but they also know if push comes to shove they have more than one 800-lb gorilla in their corner. Speaking of which, Microsoft sent people too. They paid their fees, sat dutifully and quietly, and kept tabs on the enemy. The guy I knew was from MS seemed to take the most notes during the LGPL segment of the day.
Overall, I’d say most of the participants were pleased with the day, but some were irked that they couldn’t get more detailed information about when the FSF would consider them/their clients to be violating the GPL and when not. Since the FSF has never had to go to court to get people to comply with the GPL the lawyers have no cases to cite and this really tweaks their noses. The FSF is not really apologetic about not going to court. They say they just want compliance with the GPL and if they can get that without court costs, then they’re thrilled. So far, they’re batting 1000.
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