Congratulations to Tesla on Their First Public Step Toward GPL Compliance

Conservancy rarely talks publicly about specifics in its ongoing GNU General Public License (GPL) enforcement and compliance activity, in accordance with our Principles of Community Oriented GPL Enforcement. We usually keep our compliance matters confidential — not for our own sake — but for the sake of violators who request discretion to fix their mistakes without fear of public reprisal. As occurred a few years ago with Samsung, we're thrilled when a GPL violator decides to talk about their violation and works to correct it publicly. This gives us the opportunity to shine light on the real-world work of GPL and copyleft compliance.

We're thus glad that, this week, Tesla has acted publicly regarding its current GPL violations and has announced that they've taken their first steps toward compliance. While Tesla acknowledges that they still have more work to do, their recent actions show progress toward compliance and a commitment to getting all the way there.

Conservancy has been engaging with Tesla on its GPL compliance since June 2013, when we advised Tesla that we had received multiple reports of a GPL violation regarding Tesla's Model S. Customers who purchased Tesla's Model S received on-board system(s) that contained BusyBox and Linux, but did not receive any source code, nor an offer for the source. In parallel, we also asked other entities to advise Tesla about GPL compliance. We know that Tesla received useful GPL compliance advice from multiple organizations, in addition to us, over these years.

For our part, since we first contacted Tesla, we have been working with them collaboratively in various ways to convince their original upstream providers, NVIDIA and Parrot, to disclose complete, corresponding source (CCS) releases for all GPL'd binaries found in Tesla's Model S. During that time, Tesla privately provided Conservancy with multiple rounds of “CCS candidates“. (These are source code releases that are not yet complete and corresponding as required by the GPL.) Conservancy in turn reviewed their CCS candidates and provided technical feedback on how to improve the candidates to reach compliance. In this process, we provide detailed reports explaining how the candidate releases fall short of GPL's requirements. This part of the process is the longest, most difficult part of GPL enforcement. We often wish we could celebrate the triumph of moving from a no-source-or-offer violation to the next step of “incomplete sources provided”1. However, we also can't lose sight of the fact that compliance means meeting all GPL's requirements, so we don't convey false hopes with an incomplete release. We must ultimately remain focused on user freedom in our efforts.

This week, Tesla took a new and different approach. Tesla elected to publish its incomplete CCS candidates, on the online software development collaboration site, GitHub. While our preference is that companies provide adequate CCS immediately, we realize that this can be a challenging process and recognize that Tesla has struggled for years with upstreams to yield proper CCS. We believe Tesla's new approach also has merit, because it allows the entire community to discuss and contribute in public and collaboratively assist Tesla in complying with the GPL. In a case like this, engagement in the community may be an ideal way to transparently assure that compliance is achieved.

We look forward to facilitating Tesla with this new approach to compliance. Toward that end, Conservancy has created a public mailing list to discuss Tesla's source release (and, ideally, to also discuss other CCS candidates if other GPL violators choose to also take this approach.) The first post to this mailing list is our CCS candidate evaluation report 1, written by our Compliance Engineer, Denver Gingerich.

CCS reports have been the standard document of GPL enforcement since 1998. Conservancy has probably produced hundreds of such reports since we began. However, this marks the first time that circumstances have allowed us to share such a report with the public without violating our Principles. We're excited to do that, thanks to Tesla's willingness to engage everyone in their GPL compliance process.

We know many of you, particularly those Linux-savvy folks who bought Tesla vehicles, have reached high levels of frustration with the lengthy time this GPL compliance effort is taking. Nevertheless, this situation shows precisely why patience is essential for successful enforcement work; it gives us the opportunity to welcome violators to become contributors to the copyleft software community. Our community's history is filled with such success stories. To that end, we ask that everyone join us and our coalition in extending Tesla's time to reach full GPL compliance for Linux and BusyBox, not just for the 30 days provided by following GPLv3's termination provisions, but for at least another six months.

We welcome those interested in the CCS evaluation process to join the mailing list, as this marks one of the few opportunities to engage pubilcly in CCS evaluation. Additionally, anyone who holds copyrights in Linux may join our enforcement coalition of Linux Developers by writing to <linux-services@sfconservancy.org>

1 While Tesla partly corrected the violation yesterday by making some offers for source, the source provided is not complete, corresponding source with complete “scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable”. Denver's email outlines the specific, current compliance failures.

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