Comment by omnicognate
1 day ago
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.
Virality is a very good feature of GPL and part of what makes it a meaningfully different choice than other open licenses, I don't know why you want attribute that to Microsoft of all places.
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.
A key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign against open source was that if you use GPL software you run the risk of inadvertantly including some of it in your proprietary software and accidentally causing the whole thing to suddenly become open source against your horrified company's wishes. It was a lie then and it's a lie now. The comment I was replying to (along with many others on this post) indicates the brainworm lives on.
The difference between a license and a contract may be too subtle for the denizens of HN to grasp in 2025 but I assure you it's not lost on the legal system. It's not lost on those of us who followed groklaw back in the day, either. Sad we have to live with an internet devoid of such joys now.
Another key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign was you have to open source any code modifications you write to a GPL codebase even if you don't want to. That doesn't make that feature of GPL a fallacy others must be too stupid to understand, it just means Microsoft was trying to make the promises of GPL seem bad when they were actually good. I.e. what Microsoft tried to scare people with is irrelevant to a discussion about what's in the GPL itself. Ironically, it's more akin to FUD than anything else in this conversation.
I do miss groklaw, been far too long for something like that to appear again.
It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules.
You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.
It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist.
What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you *are* allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone either:
* using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or
* coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that).
If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3].
As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you literally said, in these exact words, "the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc.....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
[3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wa...
I do greatly appreciate you talking about cases instead of leaving it at saying there isn't a part of the license and calling any discussion about it FUD.
The Cisco case was about distributing GPL binaries, not linking it with the rest of the code base and the rest of that code base then needing to be GPL. It's a standard license enforcement unrelated to the unique requirements of GPL.
The BusyBox case is probably the closest in the list, but as you already point out we didn't get a ruling to set precedent and instead got a settlement. It seems obvious what the ruling would be (to me at least), but settlement was explicitly not what is being talked about.
Bringing in French courts, they issued fines - they didn't issue the type of order this article talks about which is about releasing the entire thing involved at the time with GPL.
This isn't related to fear, uncertainty, or doubt about GPL. It's related to what has/hasn't already been ruled in the court systems handling this license before as the article skips past a bit. Even in the case we assume the courts will rule with what seems obvious (to me at least), it has a tangible difference in how these cases will be run, the assumptions they will have, and how long they will last.
2 replies →