Kernel contributions from organisations and individual privacy

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:39:21 -0400, Ruben Safir said:

> those lawsuites would be challenged for law of standing.

I do believe that has *never* been much of a problem for the guys
at gpl-violations.org - it's pretty much a slam dunk:

1) You distributed the kernel without source.

2) The kernel is covered by the GPLv2.

3) I am the author of the following lines of code: drivers/foo/......

Now I, personally, might have trouble establishing standing, because
I don't have *that* many lines of code in the kernel, and they're mostly
2-4 line patches of no large significance - Apple could probably take my
code out, and fix the build failures and so on in some other way, and ship it.

On the other hand, even Apple is going to squirm if they get a letter that
starts "Hi, I'm Ted T'so and we seem to have a slight problem...." (where
Ted's name can be replaced by several hundred others big enough that if
you excise the code they wrote, your kernel has problems).

(For the record, it was Chris Hellwig that ended up filing suit against
VMWare - and the last I heard, VMWare hasn't even *tried* to dismiss the
suit due to lack of standing on Hellwig's part...)
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