(4 votes, average: 8.75 out of 10)
Loading ...GNU General Public License considered very strong, still not challenged in court
You sometimes hear people trying to dismiss the GNU General Public License, the most popular of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, as being unenforceable. While there is a long list of companies that have been alleged to infringe the license, none of these companies seem to agree this license is unenforceable and opt to settle out of court rather than challenge the license.
The latest case involves Verizone. Verizon distributes BusyBox to its customers in devices that are provided to Verizon by Actiontec Electronics, Inc. In December the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of BusyBox against Verizone alleging infringement of the GPL. Only a few months later they are announcing that the BusyBox Developers Agree To End GPL Lawsuit Against Verizon.
Please remember this fact when you hear people trying to dismiss the GPL as unenforceable. Some very large and successful companies have been accused of infringing the GPL, and they have all opted to comply with the license rather than challenge it. I believe they companies understand how enforceable the GPL is, and recognize they could not win against it in court.
Please also remember these cases when you hear someone claim that FLOSS is “giving away” software. Clearly there are obligations when distributing FLOSS, and that if you don’t live up to these obligations you will be challenged in court. Enforcing the terms of a FLOSS license is easier to enforce than the often partly unenforceable terms of a non-FLOSS EULA, this means you are more likely to get caught than infringing a non-FLOSS EULA. This is because the obligations created by FLOSS licenses largely only create obligations on distributors and fellow software developers, not simple end users of the software.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
A lot more like this would make my continued days.
March 21st, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“Enforceable” is too broad a term.
I don’t think there’s much contention that the license can’t be enforced at some level. Much of the license well within the bounds of what a copyright holder can control.
The recent court cases have typically been around relatively obvious requirements - generally, providing source code as a requirement for distribution. The hard parts, about things like linking and derivative works, have not been raised in court. Nor, for that matter, have the courts addressed the question of damages, an area where the nature of FLOSS raises difficult questions.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
The issue of damages is easy in countries like Canada and the USA which have statutory damaged. No economic harm has to be indicated at all, so the questions that show up in other countries about the monetary value of infringing FLOSS would never come up.
The question about “linking” is no more hard than many of the other questions that come up in Copyright. If we are looking for certainty before we use the term “enforceable”, we won’t find it in contract law at all. This is especially true of contracts around intangible exclusive rights. The GPL is about as clear and certain as I think we can ever get.
Now, when it comes to the AGPL I think we are in different territory. This specific license gets into activities which are not explicitly discussed in Copyright law, and to which I don’t think copyright law should cover. If there were ever a case that challenged the AGPL specific requirement that otherwise private modifications to software that is not distributed or communicated be covered by the license, I know that I’ll do what I can to stand against the enforceability of the AGPL.