coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Rob Landley wrote at 23:47 (EDT) on Friday:
> When you say "used to agree and now disagrees" you're implying that my
> position changed. It didn't. The lawsuits demonstrated their complete
> inability to serve their original purpose.

The original purpose was to get compliance with the GPL.  IIRC, your
focus was one specific part of compliance: to get new textual
modifications to BusyBox that would be upstream-ready.  I agree that
rarely happens with embedded violators, and I apologize if there was a
misunderstanding about our expectations when we used to do enforcement
together.

To be abundantly clear now about the matter: the main thing that BusyBox
gets from embedded violators when Conservancy helps to bring them into
compliance is new "scripts used to control compilation and installation
of the executable", which are also required by GPLv2 and important for
users.  For example, such scripts were the only thing "new" yielded from
Erik's enforcement on Linksys' WRT54G violation ultimately only got such
scripts.  However, those scripts helped launch OpenWRT project years
ago.  More recently, build and install scripts yielded from
Conservancy's and Erik's enforcement against Samsung on their TV's
similarly helped launch the SamyGo project.

> they're profitable for the lawyers, 

Well, Conservancy isn't legally permitted to make a profit, so we're
certainly not making a profit at this!

You can find all you want about our finances, since they are also
legally required to be public:
        http://sfconservancy.org/about/filings/

Meanwhile, Conservancy does use outside legal counsel, but I know they
barely recover their costs, and end up taking effective hourly rates on
this work that are not too far above minimum wage!  In other words,
they're giving us serious "low bono" work that's bordering on "pro
bono".  While that's "profitable" for them in the sense that a job as a
McDonald's cashier is "profitable", it's not outlandish income, IMO.
-- 
   -- bkuhn