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pclmulqdqtoday at 1:48 PM3 repliesview on HN

I thought the whole concept of a viral license was legally questionable to begin with. There haven't been cases about this, as far as I know, and GPL virality enforcement has just been done by the community.


Replies

omnicognatetoday at 1:56 PM

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

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CamouflagedKiwitoday at 2:07 PM

There have been a number of of cases, which are linked from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Leg...) - most recently Entr’Ouvert v. Orange had a strong judgement (under French law) in favour of the GPL.

Conversely, to my knowledge there has been no court decision that indicates that the GPL is _not_ enforceable. I think you might want to be more familiar with the area before you decide if it's legally questionable or not.

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iso1631today at 2:01 PM

If you don't like the license, then don't accept it.

You are then restricted by copyright just like with any other creation.

If I include the source code of Windows into my product, I can't simply choose to re-license it to say public domain and give it to someone else, the license that I have from Microsoft to allow me to use their code won't let me - it provides restrictions. It's just as "viral" as the GPL.

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