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   aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:37 JST aeva

   A funny bit of trivia from the GPL's wikipedia page: Area Man Violates Own License

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:39 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • MrCopilot

     @mrcopilot ok so here's a contrived example: let's say someone makes a game that has an unmodified GPL dependency, and they distribute the game with the game's source code, but because they don't understand how licenses work they put their own source code under CC-BY-NC-ND which forbids modification, commercial use, and doesn't grant any useful rights specific to software. That's several GPL violations despite their source code being available to the public.

     clacke likes this.
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     MrCopilot (mrcopilot@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:40 JST MrCopilot

     in reply to

     @aeva what else could you violate?

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:41 JST aeva

     in reply to

     A question for open source licensing nerds out there: has anyone ever been taken to court over a GPL violation for anything other than the requirements involving the mere availability of source code?

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     MrCopilot (mrcopilot@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:43 JST MrCopilot

     in reply to

     @aeva I worked on a commercial device that shipped with some PC software & the embedded device sources were just packaged on that CD.

     There was definitely no feasible way for the customer/end user or even manufacturer to update that code without removing a bunch of silicone and soldering on a serial interface, but you know, "letter of the law". Back then I was just happy to be putting another penguin off the end of a production line.

     Now, I am conflicted with a few decisions made above me.

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:44 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • MrCopilot

     @mrcopilot so in theory the copyright holder for whatever GPL library that game used could sue in hopes of getting the code released under a compatible license or to get the game pulled from distribution or collect damages or whatever else it is that people who file lawsuits hope to achieve

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:47 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Jeffrey

     @drakonite @aeva You need to provide the source code or an offer to provide the source code.

     Those who provided source presumably would not bother to provide an offer, so if the source was incomplete they were in violation of the terms and had no right to distribute the binaries.

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     Jeffrey (drakonite@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:52 JST Jeffrey

     in reply to

     @aeva Funny bit of trivia: that isn't actually violation. The GPL only requires to make the source code available, and only to those you distributed binaries to. It does not require you distribute it with the binaries nor publicly post it somewhere.

     They'd only be in violation if someone downloaded the binary and requested the source and it was refused.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:53 JST clacke

     in reply to
     @aeva Barely anyone has been taken to court to begin with. There are, what, four publically known court cases?
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:54 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • MrCopilot

     @aeva @mrcopilot Less contrived:

     Clueless dev taking some GPL code and putting it under a non-reciprocal license probably happens fairly often. I seem to recall some cases where this has been discovered and the non-reciprocally-licensed project had to make effort to remove the GPL'ed parts.

     Not due to court action though, just some clued-in person in the project doing some pre-emptive action to keep the project in the clear.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:54 JST clacke

     in reply to

     There have even been (non-court) cases where a non-reciprocal license was violated, because even the very low bar of not removing license notices was too high.

     This might have initially happened to some BSD drivers that were imported to Linux, but I may be remembering it wrong.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:55 JST clacke

     in reply to

     People who are clued in on copyleft may still be ignorant on non-reciprocal licenses and believe you can do whatever you like because they're compatible with e.g. the GPL.

     But to be in compliance you need to be in compliance with both licenses at the same time and compatibility merely means that this is at all possible.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:13:56 JST clacke

     in reply to

     Here's a discussion with actual lawyer Richard Fontana about a license compatibility that didn't even involve copyleft, but was just about including some 2-clause BSD code into an Apache v2 project:

     lists.openstack.org/pipermail/…

     In the end that particular change was not merged, but the discussion reinforces the theme that source availability really isn't the only factor for compliance.