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by Tomte
1906 days ago
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> and now the entire thing is "technically" GPL. The "thing" doesn't become GPL, though. They are in breach of the license, it's a major headache, and re-licensing the thing as GPL may be one way forward. That's not an automatism, though, and no court would declare the thing GPL. You may pay hefty "fictitious" licensing fees and (punitive) damages, you may have to stop distributing your thing, but you're not losing control. |
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Except in cases like this you likely won't.
As it's clearly a mistake you clearly fixed asap its unlikely you have to pay more than small punitive damages.
Wrt. license fees and (non punitive damages) it's a bit more tricky but it boils down to the damage done. But as this libraries are only distributed GPL licensed and non essential (can easily be replaced) you will have a hard time to show that any damage was done and that the software can be sold for any non negligent amount of money. And if no damage was done and there is no reasonable case for selling the software i.e. non negligible fictious license cost you can guess how the ruling will end.
If you would have intentionally/knowingly done the violation and/or it being essential non easily replaceable software which saved you a lot of money and/or gave you other benefits things are different.
But this isn't really the case in this case as far as I can tell.