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Rovio will still never be forced to distribute Angry Birds under the GPL, even if they are found to be a derived work by association. Being found of infringeme
by nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
Rovio will still never be forced to distribute Angry Birds under the GPL, even if they are found to be a derived work by association. Being found of infringement just means they have to stop distributing Angry Birds, in it's infringing form. Once the infringement is fixed, Rovio can then distribute the non-infringing form of Angry Birds without having to license it as GPL.
If however, Rovio wants to continue distributing the infringing form of Angry Birds, they only license they are legally allowed to use for that is the GPL.
But at no point is Rovio ever forced to distribute a GPL licensed version of Angry Birds.
- cube13 16y agoIt is true that Rovio isn't forced by anyone to create a GPL version or to release their code. I should have pointed this out. However, their options are pretty limited, considering they want to make money off of the software. They could simply stop distributing it from the platform. But they want to make money, which means that they(presumably) want to get as many sales of the game as possible on as many platforms as possible. However, if the main system interface is GPL(and not LGPL), the GPL does not allow anything to link against it that is not GPL code. So, given that, they are effectively forced to do it if they want to get any further sales and ad revenue on the Android platform, because they would not be able to distribute the game in it's current version.