Today, Red Hat and several other major technology companies released a commitment to afford GPLv3-style cure terms to GPLv2 violations, in an effort to “provide greater predictability to users of open source software.”
Red Hat’s pledge comes on the heels of a community enforcement pledge by the Linux kernel developers, reported here,which was in turn preceded by the SFC/FSF community enforcement guidelines.
These commitments represent a consistent community effort to distance enforcers (or potential enforcers) — like Software Freedom Conservancy, the Linux Foundation, and other technology companies — from the kind of copyright trolls reported here. They also represent an effort to resolve the legal questions raised by lack of an express cure provision in GPLv2, and other open source licenses.
UPDATE: Bruce Perens wrote an interesting FAQ on this.
