Comment by scraft
7 years ago
I hate all this stuff, I wish Google just blocked all GPL code for me so I never had to see any of it. I have committed to many open source projects and have open soured my own projects. Of course I appreciate anyone is free to use what ever license they like but I do find is frustrating that a game (which is a complex piece of software taking lots of development time) gets picked apart because of a string formatting function, which should really have been available in the system libs, but as it wasn't a quick replacement was grabbed, with a small amount of extra time I suspect a replacement could have been found which wasn't GPL. But due to the lack of care, understanding, appreciation, someone could get their meathooks into the developer/publisher and cause harm. The software didn't sell because of this stupid function, the stupid function almost certainly existed, GPL free in many places, the GPL version had no value at all over any other version, yet where the developer cut and pasted from can have such catastrophic consequences. If it makes no difference to the end binary I feel like a dev should just be able to find or write an alternative and say you are right, that slipped through, sorry, we have now replaced it in our code tree with this version, it makes 0 difference to the end product, so building and shipping a new version would make no difference, simply making this change in our source tree effectively resolves the issue.
In this particular case it seems fairly unlikely that there will be any significant consequences. At worst, the game source code might now be forced into a GPL license. It's mostly worthless at this point anyway.
It is interesting to wonder how this case may have been handled if it was overall more relevant, though. I think a court might assess the actual value of that one function and say that it was something like fair use. Might be a bigger problem if there's a lot more, though.