I thought companies could bribe through the legal system, so why not licenses?
Legal questions would have to be answered on a per-country basis, since different high courts can make different rulings.
I’m not sure people ‘bribe their way through’ a legal system by simply paying money, then wandering off with a good ruling. Vague laws might be swayed, but having public courts mean people can’t just aske for a murder charge to be dropped.
I don’t know of any unambiguous GPL violation which has been left alone. Trump’s social media (truth-social or something) was found to have violataed the GPL, so they’ll have to release that code.
Isn’t that a corp just buying a license or donating money to a foundation?
Isn’t that a corp just buying a license
No. What I mean is bribing courts to bypass the requirement to follow the license.
or donating money to a foundation?
No.
No. What I mean is bribing courts to bypass the requirement to follow the license.
I’d fuckin riot
In that case… Those are called political donations.
Copyleft licenses have largely remained untested in courts. It’s surprising that Oracle hasn’t made a shell company, violated its own GPL license, then thrown the court case to create precedent that GPL is unenforceable.
IANAL but I think that in itself would get thrown out. I remember from my media law class that after so many jokes about Fox News on the Simpsons, they sued Fox Entertainment and the rolling in the case was essentially “You can’t sue yourself”
Yep. I thought they would have done it too.
It’s very depressing though; copyleft licenses could easily be overthrown. :(
when they need to they probably will.
right now who is even going to put them in the position they even need to worry about that kind of expense?
If a company had money to “bribe” why wouldn’t they just pay off the original creators for a license change? Or make their own version of the gpl codebase?
It’s not the 90s anymore, the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing. And companies are more willing to upstream their code, regardless of license.
If a company had money to “bribe” why wouldn’t they just pay off the original creators for a license change?
That can get expensive. If the companies could systematically subvert copyleft licenses; then they wouldn’t have to bribe each creator for a license change.
It’s not the 90s anymore
OK. It’s the 2020s and it’s still relevant.
the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing.
- Source?
- And? Popularity doesn’t reduce the relevancy of permissive or copyleft licensing.
Permissive licensing is still flawed; because it allows companies to remove the freedoms set by the license and not contribute to the original project. The Amazon-Elastisearch scandal is a modern example of abusing permissive licenses.[1][2]
If you want a time-relevant example, Microsoft’s ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ tactic preyed on noncopyleft programs by copying the standard and then adding proprietary features to lock people out of it.[3] Copyleft is designed to prevent this tactic from working.
And companies are more willing to upstream their code,
Open-source is an irrelevant topic here. I am debating about copyleft licenses, not open-source licenses.
The thing I don’t like about copyleft is the implication that a license is even a valid thing. I get it, in the Church of Satan kind of beat them at their own game thing… But… Shouldn’t we just obsolete scarcity and publish everything public domain if we really believe in free ideas?
Yes and no. On a raw principle, yes. But what are the practical consequences of non-copyleft licenses? It’s just more corporate exploitation of volunteer maintainers, as we see in the open-source ecosystem.
