Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by actionfromafar 851 days ago
The infection meme is very good to easily explain how GPL works - but it does "infect" only if you follow the license terms.

If you do not follow the license terms, you are using a copyrighted work without permission. And then, we are back to plain copyright law, with potential damages being awarded etc. (And the copyright owner is under no obligation to let the past infraction slip just because the violating party decides to suddenly follow the GPL terms.)
1 comments
jojobas 851 days ago
>And the copyright owner is under no obligation to let the past infraction slip just because the violating party decides to suddenly follow the GPL terms.

The owner might not, the court might. Proving damages from tardy publishing of source code would be tedious (at least in the EU). In this case they used their proprietary license option to justify the damages, which doesn't exist for a lot of software.

link
actionfromafar 851 days ago
Yes, that is a very good point. To be awarded monetary damages, you have to make a case for it. In practice, I think a lot of companies wouldn't want to find out and try to settle in private instead.

In this case as you say, they had a proprietary license, so I guess the bottom floor for damages is the same price as a proprietary license. But I could from my complete layman perspective imagine damages to reputation, decreased likelyhood of getting new proprietary sales in the future if companies can ignore the licensing terms with impunity etc?

link