The rise of copyright trolls

The rise of copyright trolls

EU packaging regulations! These require companies to minimize packaging material for products sold in the EU to combat unnecessary waste. Say that you have a tiny component that comes with GPL software. Adding a CD, with the sources would increase the packaging dramatically, and might not be compliant with EU packaging regulations.

All sorts of computer products here in the EU come with a CD, which usually contains drivers and/or documentation. This doesn't seem to fall foul of packaging regulations even though including the CD could easily be avoided by making the drivers and documentation downloadable on the Internet. And of course on the typical driver/documentation CD there would be ample room for source code if the manufacturer had to comply with the GPL. Therefore I call BS. Come up with a better example.

What Mr Radcliffe said is that we need to set community expectations of what acceptable in terms of compliance actually means, but at the moment we are not having that discussion.

Presumably, acceptable compliance means that the complete source code for all GPL-licensed components of a product is made available to downstream users as per the stipulations of the GPL (i.e., either by direct inclusion or else by making a written offer to provide it at cost). That doesn't appear to be negotiable, because effectively waiving this obligation would make it silly for software authors to use the GPL in the first place (the BSD licence would do perfectly well).