Here is an exact excerpt from the license text: > You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also

Here is an exact excerpt from the license text: > You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways: (...) The only requirement is that people who get the product (not the public, not the owners of the work it's based on, not anybody else) are also able to get the source code under the same license. You can totally have a private fork, you just: * Have to give the source to the people who get the binaries (for example by giving people access to the private fork when they pay) * Those sources have to be under the GPL too (which means in particular that those people can put it in a public repo if they want but don't owe anybody anything) So the situation you describe is NOT a violation, unless anyone is withholding source code, changing to an incompatible license, or going after people exercising the rights they were granted by the license.