Comment by pclmulqdq
1 day ago
I thought the whole concept of a viral license was legally questionable to begin with. There haven't been cases about this, as far as I know, and GPL virality enforcement has just been done by the community.
1 day ago
I thought the whole concept of a viral license was legally questionable to begin with. There haven't been cases about this, as far as I know, and GPL virality enforcement has just been done by the community.
The GPL was tested in court as early as 2006 [1] and plenty of times since. There are no serious doubts about its enforceability.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf
I know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself, but there is nuance in what is being said here.
That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself.
The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself.
I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.
There is no "virality", and the article's use of "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that license for a particular use may require that you license other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you have been granted) your use of the the original code will be a violation of copyright. All of this has been repeatedly tested in court.
It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years later.
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That case has little to do with the license itself and nothing to do with its virality.
As I said, that was merely the first of many. And there is no such thing as "virality" - see my answer to the sibling to your comment.
The "enforceability" of the GPL was never in any doubt because it's not a contract and doesn't need to be "enforced". The license grants you freedoms you otherwise may not have under copyright. It doesn't deny you any freedoms you would otherwise have, and it cannot do so because it is not a contract. If the terms of the GPL don't apply to your use then all you have is the normal freedoms under copyright law, which may prohibit it. If so, any "enforcement" isn't enforcement of the GPL. It's enforcement of copyright, and there's certainly no doubt on the enforceability of that.
For the GPL to "fail" in court it would have be found to effectively grant greater freedoms than it was designed to do (or less, resulting in some use not being allowed when it should be, but that's not the sort of case being considered here). It doesn't, and it has repeatedly stood up in court as not granting additional freedoms than were intended.
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I think you need to define what you mean by the term "virality" here, because I don't see how this could be associated with any feature of the GPL, and it's definitely the reason of disagreements in this thread.
There have been a number of of cases, which are linked from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Leg...) - most recently Entr’Ouvert v. Orange had a strong judgement (under French law) in favour of the GPL.
Conversely, to my knowledge there has been no court decision that indicates that the GPL is _not_ enforceable. I think you might want to be more familiar with the area before you decide if it's legally questionable or not.
I'm not suggesting that you avoid following it. I'm just not that convinced it's enforceable in the US. The French ruling is good, though.
If you don't like the license, then don't accept it.
You are then restricted by copyright just like with any other creation.
If I include the source code of Windows into my product, I can't simply choose to re-license it to say public domain and give it to someone else, the license that I have from Microsoft to allow me to use their code won't let me - it provides restrictions. It's just as "viral" as the GPL.
I like the GPL. I just don't know how much you can actually enforce it.
Also, "don't use my code" is not viral. If you break the MSFT license, you pay them, which is a very well-tested path in courts. The idea of forced public disclosure does not seem to be.
How much do you pay them?
If the GPL license didn't exist, and instead you just relying on copyright, then that's an injunction. You have to stop using the code you "stole" and pay reparations.
In UK law, if you distribute copyright material in the course of a business you can be facing 10 years in prison and an unlimited fine.
Sure you can't get them to agree to the GPL, they could simply stop distributing and then turn up to their stint in prison and massive fine. In reality I suspect they would take the easy way out and comply with the license.
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