If you are one of the infringed parties, I'd be happy to talk with you about what your options are. bruce at perens dot com or +1 510-4PERENS (I'm not there today, but it will take a message). I am not a lawyer but I work with the good ones and can bring them into the conversation if necessary.

As a community we've managed to almost completely ignore that because of their use of dual-licensing, MySQL made 1.1 Billion dollars after 9 years in business, and that for a database that was written by one person, and the code base remained available under the GPL.

IMO, 1.1 Billion dollars is pretty damn impressive. Especially if you get paid that to make Free Software. Heck, sign me up!

Oracle was a bad actor, and Monty is now leading further development of that same code base under the GPL. But it did not have to be that way.

How do you prove damages or have the right to settle violations if you don't have copyright?

If you have been doing enough work to justify getting paid for the software, you have an ample amount of your own copyrighted work to base your claim upon. If you haven't done that much work, what are you suing for?

You can also get a grant of the right to sue from your contributors. You can include in the agreement how you will apportion damages: for example you could take the ratio of your lines of modified code checked in vs. that of contributed code checked in, and give that portion of damages to FSF.

You do have to get either copyright assignment or the right to relicense from your contributors, if you have contributors, or the whole scheme doesn't work. But maybe you get enough money to pay them some.

Yes, writing Morse Code Software is one of the creative and educational things you can do with Morse code.

It took me 60 days to get to 20 WPM, working for a long time every day.

In contrast, it took a lot less time to write an interrupt-driven, terminate-and-stay-resident Morse Code sounder program in 6502 assembler. And I learned the instruction set, too.

I'm not saying you don't want to do either. It just doesn't belong on the test.

I help GPL violators clean up their act, it's my main business.

Every one has had a total lack of due diligence. I will come in and find that they have violated the licenses of 21 proprietary software companies (this is a real customer example) by integrating their code into their main product, just like the GPL code. Some of them only had an "evaluation" license, some not even that, some wildly violated the terms of any license they got.

Most of them are in silicon valley. They seem to have the attitude that they will clean up their legal problems when they're rich, and nothing but getting their product out of the door matters until then.

They don't ask me to feel sorry for them. I bill them a lot, and in the end, they're clean and legal.

Gift-style licensing like BSD licensing is for when you want everyone to use your code so badly that you don't care what they do with it. If you have an economic reason for that, fine. But it can create harm if you don't have your economics straight. Heartbleed was an economic failure of gift-style licensing. Very wealthy companies used OpenSSL and didn't contribute to its maintenance. There was some astronomical amount of economic damage in result. I think we all would have been better off had OpenSSL been dual-licensed and paid for by some folks, even if it had fewer users that way. And maybe that way its original developers would not have had to go to work for RSA, who prohibited them from ever touching their old code again. That's why we still have Eric Young's old, old license with the attribution clause nobody else uses any longer. He can't touch it.

GPL IMO does work best with dual licensing, because people who just hate the GPL can get what they want, and pay for making more Free Software. But if you don't care about money and don't want to use dual licensing, the growth effect you get from GPL is a lot better than making yourself some very rich company's unpaid employee by giving them all possible rights except for a very limited attribution.

Some people should pay. Some should get stuff for free. They aren't in general the same people, and they self-classify.

You must have missed the joke: "Some of our digital communications use only one digit!"

Yes, I know about the NAVAIDs, but they identify at 5 WPM and the airman's charts print the dots and dashes next to the waypoint. And there might still be runway aids that say a few letters, also at 5 WPM, but it's always the same letters for left and right and the outer, middle, and inner marker. Pilots learn the sounds for each.

When I was a Technician licensee, all of the repeaters were populated mostly by Technician licensees, and identified much faster than any of them could copy. So it was clear the Morse tone (erroneously called a "CW" ID because it wasn't Constant Wave) was there for a legal requirement only. But most of the repeaters could identify in phone, too. Back in NY, we had WR2ACD identify with the voice of the famous CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was of course KB2GSD.

Actually it has QWERTY :-)

I remember in about 1979 having a conversation with someone who was convinced of the superiority of EBCDIC, and really disappointed that ASCII had become the standard. I think he died a long time ago. I wonder what he would have thought of Unicode?

I drive an automobile. It has an internal-combustion engine.

My computer keyboard has QUERTY.

I think there's a century behind both of those things, isn't there?

I am told that Bill Cross, the FCC staffer then in charge of Amateur Radio, had this displayed on his office wall. It was, of course, very different from the usual FCC comment. I was trying to make a point of how antique Morse was.

The Novice license stopped being the path to entry once the no-code Technician licensing started. There was indeed an ITU requirement, but it was at the behest of IARU, not as the requirement of any government. Similarly, FCC actually raised code speed requirements at the behest of ARRL. Shore stations had moved to phone and teletype decades before. Most ships no longer employed radio operators, but left that duty to other staff who only used phone. There was only a token continuing monitoring of Morse ship transmissions, now entirely gone.

There was one pro-code guy who pleaded with me to allow Amateur Radio to "die with dignity". If nothing else did, that convinced me that the pro-code folks could see the end coming and would accept it as long as it came after they died. Amateur licensing was declining fast, operators were dying faster than new ones got licenses, and we could see the end of Amateur Radio would come in a few decades at most..

Now there are more hams than ever, and Amateur Radio is healthy. When I say "We won", it means "Amateur Radio won". It's too bad we had to fight our own old guys.

There isn't really any reason for government agencies and NGOs to use Amateur Radio. They have satellite phones, etc. But if it really bothers you, why not lobby against allowing compensation for operators? I'd join that bandwagon.