logoalt Hacker News

omnicognatetoday at 1:56 PM2 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

pclmulqdqtoday at 2:19 PM

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

show 1 reply
zamadatixtoday at 2:04 PM

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.

show 1 reply