Yes, there's a reason why I took it up here. It's because the thread was already public before I got here. Consider that a number of people were already publicly making protests over clear GPL violations when I got here. Those protests were visibly not being taken seriously by a known Empeg employee who happened to be posting to your board and, perhaps unwisely, appeared to be representing his company even if it was "unofficially". In general we want it publicly known that you have to take the GPL seriously, that keeps the problem from getting worse so that we would end up in court. We do not want to go to court with anyone and no lawsuit threat was made here.

I can understand why you would not want this sort of stuff on your board, but in that case you should have stopped it earlier. To terminate the discussion now gives the appearance of silencing one side of an argument, and I'd protest more if the argument wasn't already over. The Empeg folks said they'd fix the simple problems they had with GPL compliance, as far as I'm concerned that is the end of my discussion with them. Now, on to you.

In a later post on this board you claim to have placed two programs in the public domain, and then you protest that at least one of those programs was lifted wholesale and placed in a GPL program, and you weren't credited. That would make me unhappy, too. If you want to give me the details, I'll see that you get credit, and I doubt it will require any public postings.

It is ironic, though, that you express annoyance about what happened with your public domain program, because by placing it in the public domain and abandoning your own copyright you were making it legally permissible for someone else to claim authorship. That's just one of many reasons why we use the GPL. The important reason in the Empeg matter, however, was that we wanted to be able to rebuild the software in the Empeg that was ours, not Empeg's, and online copies of some of the versions they used no longer existed. You ask if I have any personal interest in Empeg player. Yes, I think it's a pretty cool product and I might buy one. And if I do buy one, I probably want to hack around inside of it. So, I want to make sure that the GPL provisions that would let me do that are being taken seriously. This should benefit any other Empeg customer who wants to get inside of the player, as well.

Since you made your own programs public domain, they can be considered a gift. That is, there are essentially no rules regarding what someone does with them. GPL progams are not a gift, they are to be shared, and we have rules for sharing that we really need you to take seriously, or fewer people will write. It took about a man-day for Empeg to come into compliance with those rules, no big deal.

I honor that you've made two programs public. If you had put in as much time as I had, literally years without pay, into making your software public, you might have even stronger feelings about other people complying with your license than you have about the mis-attribution of your public domain software. It's sometimes dishartening to have put in all of that time to make a good public system like Debian and Linux and then to have someone who has done a lot less work call you a "zealot". Remember that the people who created the BSD system were on government grants or worked for an industry consortium (the ARPA grant for the Berkeley 4BSD distribution from which the free BSDs were derived, The X Consortium, The government-funded NCSA Web Server that Apache is derived from, etc.) or were otherwise getting paid, and thus did not see a need for any additional quid-pro-quo as with the GPL. Most GPL authors, in contrast, were on their own time from the start. It happens that I will get my very first paycheck for working on GPL software in a few days. Since 1993, I've been doing that with no pay.

So, I wish you'd be a little bit more understanding when we ask for people to take our software license seriously.

Thanks

Bruce