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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> The CEO of Wix admitted that the derived work in this case contains "more than 3 million lines of code"... The copyright owner of the GPL'd module could sue them to have all that released under the GPL, and (assuming Wix wouldn't comply) then we would finally know if the license holds up in court or not.

The copyright owner would win, but all they would likely get out of the court is an injunction stopping Wix from distributing the infringing product and monetary damages. They would probably not be able to force Wix to release source code.

If the GPL code is just a wrapper around MIT licensed code, as has been claimed, Wix should be able to quickly change their code to use that MIT code directly instead of using WordPress' GPL wrapper.

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That would still be a major victory for the GPL. To my knowledge it has never been tested in court in the USA.

Everyone knows that the GPL is being commonly violated by companies that just don't care and developers who don't understand it. Any US legal precedent around GPL would be welcome.

Say again? The Netfilter case was the first and is famous. Harald Welte vs. Skype was another.

You're quite right -- I was thinking about US only, not worldwide. Will edit to correct.

I suspect the reason those cases have been in Germany and not in the US aren't simply that Harald Welte happens to live in Germany, because the US surely has people who would like to put up a fight.

I guess a big part of the reason is that suing in Germany is costly, but not "you'll be poor for the rest of your life" costly.

If as some have commented, parts of the MIT license attribution were removed, Automattic might not have been legally allowed to distribute the software either. At which points the involved lawyers would have a field day trying to figure out how binding a license is that you use for distribution of works that you are not allowed to redistribute.

WordPress isn't even properly GPL-licensed. No license in the top-level app file [1] [2]. The included license file doesn't selectively attach itself to all relevant files, and not to source files that have a different license [3]. WordPress contains copyrighted material that's definitely not GPL-compatible [4], so even if the previous points are considered irrelevant, it remains questionable if the source can be distributed under the terms of the GPL at all [5].

[1] https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/index.php

[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

[3] https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/license.t...

[4] https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-conten...

[5] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html See term 7.

Copyrighted song lyrics are not gpl compatible? Well, hmm. Do you have a better example, say of included code under an incompatible license?

The bigger problem is that the lyrics are probably in direct violation of copyright unless they were used with permission. They shouldn't be part of the GPL code unless the copyright holder has permitted that too.

As it stands there semm to be two readings from this: 1) the plugin is not part of the GPL code and de-facto unlicensed ("All rights reserved"), meaning the plugin can not be included in GPL redistributions of Wordpress; or 2) the plugin is part of the code and the code is therefore not eligible to be distributed under the GPL in the first place.

IANAL and I'm not intimately familiar with the US legal system but I'm pretty sure the license applies to all code not explicitly covered by any other license, even if it's not added as a file header (otherwise all similar projects in which the license is merely distributed as the LICENSE file and referenced in the README would be unlicensed too). Term 0 actually only says a notice must be placed in the "program or other work" -- placing that notice in the readme seems sufficient if the readme is part of the program/work. The suggestion of how to apply the license is explicitly just a suggestion or recommendation, not a requirement.

The existence of non-GPL plugins without a proper exemption however might be problematic for re-distribution of the bundle in other GPL software. It could be argued that the plugin in question isn't part of the code covered by the GPL but then the official Wordpress distribution itself is obviously also not entirely GPL and can't be redistributed fully under the GPL.

For an example of partially GPL-compatible software re-distributed under GPL consider the program formerly known as IceWeasel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat (a modified version of Firefox minus the proprietary branding).

It's interesting that the Broadway play opened on January 16, 1964, just 16 days after the starting date for automatic renewal of copyright set by the Act of 1992. Had it opened just a couple of weeks before, and not renewed¹, it'd be in the Public Domain by now.

¹ Only 15% of works were renewed after its initial 28 years of protection, which just goes to show the insanity of the current default duration.

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