I see your point more clearly now, I guess we still differ on priorities. Having such a key player within the open source community normalize GPL violation seems somewhat urgent to me - if the current level of interest from the conservancy is overkill, what level of engagement would you consider appropriate?
These things will keep. Come back to it later when they have more resources. Ubuntu was never going to pull it out of their impending 16.04 release, so there's nothing particularly time-locked here. Licensing issues can take years to play out and resolve - and indeed in this case, legal opinion is mixed on the matter in the first place.
Put it another way: The Conservancy spends all this time and effort and eventually convinces Ubuntu's lawyers to convince Ubuntu's product manager to drop the binary and write a "use make!" wiki page. Apart from idealistic purity, what has that effort actually done? Has it given us access to source code we don't already have?
Has it shown potential wrongdoers that the law is going to penalise them if they don't play ball? Has it fostered the sense of community underlying the GPL? Will anyone outside of those techies who discuss licensing for fun even notice? If they theoretically did notice, would they be more likely to use GPL software (the underlying aim of GNU and the conservancy) or less likely, as now it seems you will get in trouble for merely associating non-GPL software with GPL software? Will the Conservancy chase after Debian next, for including binary-only non-GPL firmware blobs in their distro (not even the source available)? Conservancy says that Canonical is normalising GPL violation, but on the other hand, it also says that it's a really weird violation, unlike any other - how does a future violator theoretically leverage that?
The conservancy's current level of input to the debate is appropriate. They're clearly not expending resources they don't have for this discussion. Also, they spent years with VMWare before it finally began legal action. What we have now is a discussion.
It sounds as if you don't think there should be discussion at all. "These licenses are incompatible but screw it, ship it anyway" is shitty behavior we expect from noname WiFi router OEMs.
> Apart from idealistic purity, what has that effort actually done? Has it given us access to source code we don't already have?
If we wanted a Linux that could be used like this, it'd be LGPL. That is exactly what the LGPL is for. Really. It's that simple.
I absolutely think people should think twice before blindly depending on or mashing up GPL software - at the moment they don't, and that's how we get these messes.
It's an important landmark in the history of the GPL and I find it completely weird that anyone would expect the conservancy to remain silent on it. In terms of their long-time resourcing problem, that's got nothing to do with this case and everything to do with VMWare pulling out all the stops to get their existing support pulled.
I rather suspect if the conservancy cared about their long-term survival and keeping everybody happy that much they simply wouldn't have pursued the VMWare case.
I've just read https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl... - and whilst I still think the Conservancy is being reasonable, I can also see now how Canonical might have navigated itself toward its current position without being merely insane, malicious or self-serving.
