3 ms·

The GPL was tested in court as early as 2006 [1] and plenty of times since. There are no serious doubts about its enforceability. [1] https://www.fsf.org/news/

The GPL was tested in court as early as 2006 [1] and plenty of times since. There are no serious doubts about its enforceability. [1] https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf

zamadatix 11mo ago
I know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself, but there is nuance in what is being said here. That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself. The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself. I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.
- omnicognate 11mo ago
  There is no "virality", and the article's use of "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that license for a particular use may require that you license other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you have been granted) your use of the the original code will be a violation of copyright. All of this has been repeatedly tested in court. It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years later.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules. You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.
    - omnicognate 11mo ago
      It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist. What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you *are* allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone either: * using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or * coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that). If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3]. As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you literally said, in these exact words, "the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc._v._Cisco_Systems,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc..... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits [3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wakeup-call-for-open-source-users-french-court-awards-damages-for-gpl-violations https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wa...
  - zamadatix 11mo ago
    Virality is a very good feature of GPL and part of what makes it a meaningfully different choice than other open licenses, I don't know why you want attribute that to Microsoft of all places.
    - omnicognate 11mo ago
      A key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign against open source was that if you use GPL software you run the risk of inadvertantly including some of it in your proprietary software and accidentally causing the whole thing to suddenly become open source against your horrified company's wishes. It was a lie then and it's a lie now. The comment I was replying to (along with many others on this post) indicates the brainworm lives on. The difference between a license and a contract may be too subtle for the denizens of HN to grasp in 2025 but I assure you it's not lost on the legal system. It's not lost on those of us who followed groklaw back in the day, either. Sad we have to live with an internet devoid of such joys now.
      - zamadatix 11mo ago
        Another key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign was you have to open source any code modifications you write to a GPL codebase even if you don't want to. That doesn't make that feature of GPL a fallacy others must be too stupid to understand, it just means Microsoft was trying to make the promises of GPL seem bad when they were actually good. I.e. what Microsoft tried to scare people with is irrelevant to a discussion about what's in the GPL itself. Ironically, it's more akin to FUD than anything else in this conversation. I do miss groklaw, been far too long for something like that to appear again.
    - suspended_state 11mo ago
      I think you need to define what you mean by the term "virality" here, because I don't see how this could be associated with any feature of the GPL, and it's definitely the reason of disagreements in this thread.
pclmulqdq 11mo ago
That case has little to do with the license itself and nothing to do with its virality.
- omnicognate 11mo ago
  As I said, that was merely the first of many. And there is no such thing as "virality" - see my answer to the sibling to your comment. The "enforceability" of the GPL was never in any doubt because it's not a contract and doesn't need to be "enforced". The license grants you freedoms you otherwise may not have under copyright. It doesn't deny you any freedoms you would otherwise have, and it cannot do so because it is not a contract. If the terms of the GPL don't apply to your use then all you have is the normal freedoms under copyright law, which may prohibit it. If so, any "enforcement" isn't enforcement of the GPL. It's enforcement of copyright, and there's certainly no doubt on the enforceability of that. For the GPL to "fail" in court it would have be found to effectively grant greater freedoms than it was designed to do (or less, resulting in some use not being allowed when it should be, but that's not the sort of case being considered here). It doesn't, and it has repeatedly stood up in court as not granting additional freedoms than were intended.
  - pclmulqdq 11mo ago
    Look at the "many" if you want to cite better cases about this.
    - omnicognate 11mo ago
      I've cited further cases elsewhere in this thread. If you'd like to test this yourself feel free to repackage some GPL software as closed source, flog it to people and see what happens. I'm not your lawyer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070191
      - pclmulqdq 11mo ago
        I see more discussion in the sibling thread, but I am still waiting for a case actually relevant to the virality of the GPL. The article is about how use of GPL code can "infect" LLM weights and force their disclosure, and I am personally somewhat doubtful that is legally the case. I am also further convinced that this theory has never been given a real test.

zamadatix 11mo ago

I know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself, but there is nuance in what is being said here. That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself. The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself. I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.

omnicognate 11mo ago
There is no "virality", and the article's use of "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that license for a particular use may require that you license other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you have been granted) your use of the the original code will be a violation of copyright. All of this has been repeatedly tested in court. It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years later.
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules. You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.
  - omnicognate 11mo ago
    It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist. What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you *are* allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone either: * using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or * coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that). If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3]. As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you literally said, in these exact words, "the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc._v._Cisco_Systems,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc..... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits [3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wakeup-call-for-open-source-users-french-court-awards-damages-for-gpl-violations https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wa...
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  Virality is a very good feature of GPL and part of what makes it a meaningfully different choice than other open licenses, I don't know why you want attribute that to Microsoft of all places.
  - omnicognate 11mo ago
    A key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign against open source was that if you use GPL software you run the risk of inadvertantly including some of it in your proprietary software and accidentally causing the whole thing to suddenly become open source against your horrified company's wishes. It was a lie then and it's a lie now. The comment I was replying to (along with many others on this post) indicates the brainworm lives on. The difference between a license and a contract may be too subtle for the denizens of HN to grasp in 2025 but I assure you it's not lost on the legal system. It's not lost on those of us who followed groklaw back in the day, either. Sad we have to live with an internet devoid of such joys now.
    - zamadatix 11mo ago
      Another key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign was you have to open source any code modifications you write to a GPL codebase even if you don't want to. That doesn't make that feature of GPL a fallacy others must be too stupid to understand, it just means Microsoft was trying to make the promises of GPL seem bad when they were actually good. I.e. what Microsoft tried to scare people with is irrelevant to a discussion about what's in the GPL itself. Ironically, it's more akin to FUD than anything else in this conversation. I do miss groklaw, been far too long for something like that to appear again.
  - suspended_state 11mo ago
    I think you need to define what you mean by the term "virality" here, because I don't see how this could be associated with any feature of the GPL, and it's definitely the reason of disagreements in this thread.

pclmulqdq 11mo ago

That case has little to do with the license itself and nothing to do with its virality.

omnicognate 11mo ago
As I said, that was merely the first of many. And there is no such thing as "virality" - see my answer to the sibling to your comment. The "enforceability" of the GPL was never in any doubt because it's not a contract and doesn't need to be "enforced". The license grants you freedoms you otherwise may not have under copyright. It doesn't deny you any freedoms you would otherwise have, and it cannot do so because it is not a contract. If the terms of the GPL don't apply to your use then all you have is the normal freedoms under copyright law, which may prohibit it. If so, any "enforcement" isn't enforcement of the GPL. It's enforcement of copyright, and there's certainly no doubt on the enforceability of that. For the GPL to "fail" in court it would have be found to effectively grant greater freedoms than it was designed to do (or less, resulting in some use not being allowed when it should be, but that's not the sort of case being considered here). It doesn't, and it has repeatedly stood up in court as not granting additional freedoms than were intended.
- pclmulqdq 11mo ago
  Look at the "many" if you want to cite better cases about this.
  - omnicognate 11mo ago
    I've cited further cases elsewhere in this thread. If you'd like to test this yourself feel free to repackage some GPL software as closed source, flog it to people and see what happens. I'm not your lawyer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070191
    - pclmulqdq 11mo ago
      I see more discussion in the sibling thread, but I am still waiting for a case actually relevant to the virality of the GPL. The article is about how use of GPL code can "infect" LLM weights and force their disclosure, and I am personally somewhat doubtful that is legally the case. I am also further convinced that this theory has never been given a real test.