4 ms·

I understand that these licenses are pretty straight forward legally when it's obvious a company is violating the terms. What I've never understood is how these

by bink 5y ago

I understand that these licenses are pretty straight forward legally when it's obvious a company is violating the terms. What I've never understood is how these can be enforced when someone puts effort into obfuscating their usage of a covered piece of code. Do the aggrieved parties have a way to request an inspection similar to that used by the Software Alliance?

newacct583 5y ago
That's what the "discovery" phase of a law suit is, yes.
- bink 5y ago
  That makes sense. I was just wondering if these licenses had provisions that would allow bypassing courts where I can imagine this type of violation would be very hard to prove. e.g.: if they were openly using another product with the same or similar license. Everyone always has the right to sue and hope a judge agrees that an audit be performed. But commercial software organizations can do so without a rigorous process (not that that's a good thing).
  - runnerup 5y ago
    I suspect you're onto something here and that if a company did a good job of obfuscating their use of an AGPL backend, they could protect themselves from discovery. Without existing evidence, it seems unlikely to me that a judge wouldnt agree to throwing out the case before discovery with a motion to dismiss. I'd love if a good lawyer could weigh in.
whateveracct 5y ago
I'd imagine the normal civil lawsuit processes would apply?
kadoban 5y ago
You can probably just sue and figure it out for sure during discovery? (I'm not a lawyer)
woodruffw 5y ago
> Do the aggrieved parties have a way to request an inspection similar to that used by the Software Alliance? Yes. That's what the legal discovery process is for.
- paulgb 5y ago
  Surely a judge won't make a company provide their source code in discovery unless you can provide evidence that it uses code stolen from you. I think that's what bink is getting at -- if you suspect that someone is using your stolen code but they remove any public-facing evidence that would convince a judge to have them provide the code to you, what recourse do you have?
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    > Surely a judge won't make a company provide their source code in discovery unless you can provide evidence that it uses code stolen from you. In this particular case, there appears to be ample public evidence that the code was stolen (people have demonstrated that the stylesheets and assets distributed by TRUTH were taken directly from the Mastodon project). So I suspect, in this particular case, that a judge would not object to a source code audit during discovery. To the more general point: there are mechanisms that the court can avail itself of in more ambiguous situations. For example, a judge would be perfectly within their power to require the defendant to provide their source code to an independent evaluator.
  - jenny91 5y ago
    No, it's right. In the US you can sue them if you suspect they're using your software in an infringing way, then use the discovery process to unearth this evidence.
    - paulgb 5y ago
      You can try, sure. But AFAIK you can't just serve someone papers and compel them to turn over documents; a judge's discretion is involved in the process. If you say "I wrote some open-source self-driving car code and I think Waymo is using it", there's no way they're just going to hand over their self-driving car code.

by bink 5y ago

newacct583 5y ago

That's what the "discovery" phase of a law suit is, yes.

bink 5y ago
That makes sense. I was just wondering if these licenses had provisions that would allow bypassing courts where I can imagine this type of violation would be very hard to prove. e.g.: if they were openly using another product with the same or similar license. Everyone always has the right to sue and hope a judge agrees that an audit be performed. But commercial software organizations can do so without a rigorous process (not that that's a good thing).
- runnerup 5y ago
  I suspect you're onto something here and that if a company did a good job of obfuscating their use of an AGPL backend, they could protect themselves from discovery. Without existing evidence, it seems unlikely to me that a judge wouldnt agree to throwing out the case before discovery with a motion to dismiss. I'd love if a good lawyer could weigh in.

whateveracct 5y ago

I'd imagine the normal civil lawsuit processes would apply?

kadoban 5y ago

You can probably just sue and figure it out for sure during discovery? (I'm not a lawyer)

woodruffw 5y ago

> Do the aggrieved parties have a way to request an inspection similar to that used by the Software Alliance? Yes. That's what the legal discovery process is for.

paulgb 5y ago
Surely a judge won't make a company provide their source code in discovery unless you can provide evidence that it uses code stolen from you. I think that's what bink is getting at -- if you suspect that someone is using your stolen code but they remove any public-facing evidence that would convince a judge to have them provide the code to you, what recourse do you have?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Surely a judge won't make a company provide their source code in discovery unless you can provide evidence that it uses code stolen from you. In this particular case, there appears to be ample public evidence that the code was stolen (people have demonstrated that the stylesheets and assets distributed by TRUTH were taken directly from the Mastodon project). So I suspect, in this particular case, that a judge would not object to a source code audit during discovery. To the more general point: there are mechanisms that the court can avail itself of in more ambiguous situations. For example, a judge would be perfectly within their power to require the defendant to provide their source code to an independent evaluator.
- jenny91 5y ago
  No, it's right. In the US you can sue them if you suspect they're using your software in an infringing way, then use the discovery process to unearth this evidence.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    You can try, sure. But AFAIK you can't just serve someone papers and compel them to turn over documents; a judge's discretion is involved in the process. If you say "I wrote some open-source self-driving car code and I think Waymo is using it", there's no way they're just going to hand over their self-driving car code.