Conservancy Seeks Your Questions on GPL Enforcement

Conservancy Plans Long-Term Campaign to Educate Developers About GPL Enforcement

June 1, 2015

Today, Software Freedom Conservancy — a charity that provides a home to more than thirty Open Source and Free Software projects, and provides license enforcement efforts at the request of some of its projects, including the only unified and community-led GPL enforcement efforts for the Linux kernel — begins a long-term campaign to increase education and understanding about community-driven GPL enforcement processes.

Historically, Conservancy has published extensive materials about enforcement of the GPL, including blog posts, announcements regarding compliance actions, many sections appearing in the definitive Copyleft Guide (a joint initiative with the Free Software Foundation). After Conservancy's recent announcement of its funding of Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware, Conservancy has sought to answer as many questions as possible about GPL enforcement.

Conservancy invites developers and other Open Source and Free Software contributors to email their questions on GPL enforcement to <enforcement-questions@sfconservancy.org>. Conservancy cannot promise to answer every question; Conservancy will use the collected questions over the coming months to provide more educational and informational materials about GPL enforcement, and in particular about Conservancy's GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

Conservancy especially seeks questions from contributors to the Linux kernel, and therefore encourages questioners who have contributed to Linux to write from their email address as it appears in Linux's Git logs, so that Conservancy can prioritize their questions.