GPL-Violator Allwinner Joins The Linux Foundation

[s_j_newbury]

If they are violating GPL, they are violating copyright law. Authors should sue them, but they rarely do, because it is expensive and slow.
That is why for individual person GPL is same shit as BSD license, CC0, or public domain.

What everybody seems to miss here is copyright infringement is a criminal offence in many jurisdictions, including here in the UK. The selling, distribution or reproduction of unlicensed copyrighted materials is a matter for the police, not simply for those who hold the copyright to sue. Of course their priorities lie elsewhere, with the interests of those corporations and industry associations who lobbied to have copyright infringement criminalised in the first place.

In theory, it would be more than appropriate; and given the legislation, legal to issue import bans on foreign/multi-national corporations who do not respect legally enforcible F/OSS copyright licences. I wonder why they don't...?

[Luke_Wolf]

Even if the Linux Foundation could revoke Allwinner's licence to use the code distributed by the Linux Foundation, Allwinner can just get the code from someone else and this would be fine. Clause 6 of the GPL v2 states:

Furthermore, if you check the less authoritative GPL FAQ it states (in the context of relicencing for exclusive use) that:

The only reason we're picking on Allwinner is because they're a known violator. There are plenty of other smaller players violating the GPL and nobody will probably ever know. It's not an easy thing to police.

Incorrect the license can only not be revoked IF AND ONLY IF the license is followed. IF someone violates the license their license to the code CAN be revoked by the developer and while this has not occurred for the linux kernel AFAIK or been tested in court, Richard Stallman himself revoked the GPL license for the KDE developers who in 2003 I believe it was wrote a Qt interface for GIMP with Qt at the time being under an incompatible license, with the result being said developers could no longer use GIMP. Further the threat of revocation is what forced Samsung to release the exFAT code.

IANAL but as I understand it licenses fall under contract law and if the other party breaches the contract then the contract becomes null and void

[Ardje]

This sounds like a move that would only be done after someone held a big convincing GPL-violation stick above their heads. Part of the settlement about that violation is probably to join the linux foundation and have a good GPL compliance policy in place, and secrecy.
In Germany a company that knowingly violates the GPL can be sentenced to a product recall (if I recall correctly).
It probably isn't the FSF, else they would join the FSF.
In any way, a good move. We don't want lawsuits, we want compliance. And we want compliance to make the software better.

[ormaaj]

This.
These are the members of the foundation: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members , this is what they charge: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/...s_and_Benefits , and this is what they get for the membership: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/join/corporate . Enough said...

People being paid competitively while contributing to open-source? Blasphemy! Large companies making a positive contribution while turning a profit? Unthinkable. We must put a stop to this.