GPL Enforcement: Don’t Jump to Conclusions, But Do Report Violations – Bradley M. Kuhn
Brad Kuhn has an interesting post on the interplay between law, norms, and negotiation in GPL (a particular type of open source license) violations. He suggests that, when a violation is found, start with an assumption that there was no malicious intent and not to publicly “out” the violator.
I think a lot of geeks get religious about freedom in the open source movement. Usually this is for good reason, but occasionally the mob mentality can turn into something like a witch trial. With so few lawyers, they are a group that’s perhaps not as used to negotiation. It’s good to have even keeled people around to remind us (Slashdotters) to “remember that the primary goal of the GPL is encourage more software freedom in the world.”