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That is true, but I feel like we should apply different levels of scrutiny to some small project and an app developed by people with close ties to government of
by hnbad 6y ago
That is true, but I feel like we should apply different levels of scrutiny to some small project and an app developed by people with close ties to government officials who received literally millions of Euros in public funding to develop and license this app.
This isn't even a GPL violation as the code in question was licensed under a BSD license. They simply removed the original copyright notice, which may have been a genuine accident caused by misconfigured tooling (especially since someone mentioned they changed the formatting).
The reason people are outraged is entirely that this is a publicly funded multi-million Euro project that is already facing accusations of corruption/nepotism and tried to open-source wash a proprietary product (as the app wasn't even published under an open-source license at the time). You can't really point at this incident and derive a general point about "people's attitudes towards violating the GPL".
- berkes 6y agoI am not familiar enough with BSD, but would it not be a licence breach, when you alter libraries with a BSD licence and redistribute those in a closed-source app? At least with GPL that would most likely be the case. If so, regardless of their "accidental tooling removing the copyright notice", they would be violating that copyright. Also, IANAL.
- hnbad 6y agoOh, I'm not saying what they did wasn't illegal (tho IANAL, so I can't say whether this would indeed be considered copyright infringement and warrant damages in Germany). I'm just saying that forgetting that your autoformatter strips license comments when you copy permissively licensed third-party code into your codebase is a different level of impolite than using copyleft licensed third-party code with no intention to adhere to the copyleft restriction.