So if you don't sue to get paid or to get attribution you don't have a case. This way GPL would be unenforceable.
There are some other aspects of the license which I would've found much more interesting to be tested in court, especially the FSF's concept of treating dynamically linked executables as derived works and the question who can sue if no source code is provided.
That would make any gift of copyrighted material invalid.
Germany had to amend the law back in the day to make Open Source legal.
Before that it wasn't possible to forgoe payment and even now it's not possible in many cases.
as far as i know only the moral rights can not be given up, but i am unaware that there was an issue with giving away work for free.
There are lot of nuances what constitutes consideration, it varies by jurisdiction and also there is lot of common law ( i.e. based on judicial precedents ) that can be complicated and only experts could really could even a given opinion on that and only way to be really know is after that issue comes up in a case for first time in that jurisdiction.
Using Quebec's terminology by way of example, a contract where an advantage is given in exchange for rendering the obligation (so roughly a contract with consideration) is called an onerous contract, and most typical contracts for services fall into this category. The kind where one obligates oneself without receiving an advantage in return is called a gratuitous contract, and they classify gifts in this category.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-Klausel
The referenced article is §32 UrhG
I's basically a big fuck you to anyone who does not commercializes his software but wants to contribute to the software ecosystem and only expects users to also contribute back to it.
Maybe we need a GPL4 with a building nuke. "You agree to pay 1 Trillion dollars if you do not publish your changes".
The problem here is that "user contributions" are basically impossible to value. Who knows what they might have contributed, and what value others may be able to derive from those contributions. I can't think of a single good way to translate that into dollars. You could charge engineer hours, but who knows how many they would have contributed.
> Maybe we need a GPL4 with a building nuke. "You agree to pay 1 Trillion dollars if you do not publish your changes".
I hope this is in jest, because I fear something like that would chase off open source developers.
I do think it could use a penalties clause. I would suggest something in the net revenue or profit category. It makes the penalty scale, including scaling down to 0 for other open source projects. I don't want to encourage open source projects ignoring licenses, but I do think suing them for money seems unfair when the currency of open source is really contributions.
I would guess courts have ways of determining this, perhaps via subject matter experts. It's not like GPL software is the only kind of software for which it might be impossible to obtain a proprietary license - there are probably many cases of proprietary software copying from other proprietary software, where one party isn't willing or able to provide a license to another (for instance, a company might be competing in the same space as another that copied their code, so they're unwilling to provide a license). But more likely a settlement would be reached in a case of clearcut copyright infringement.
It also sounds like it would be a pretty radical change to how copyright laws work, but I’m no expert here.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
For example, in 2012 the Court of Justice of the European Union declared that reselling digital software is legal no matter what any EULA attached to the software might say.
https://www.engadget.com/2012-07-03-eu-court-rules-its-legal...
Only the parts of the agreement that violate the local laws can be ignored.
Different people have different ideas of what is reasonable and what is bullshit. Different jurisdictions as well, which is why some clauses in EULAs written by American lawyers are invalid in the EU.
> Only the parts of the agreement that violate the local laws can be ignored.
That is the whole point: to know for sure which ones you can ignore, you need to test them in court.
After all, you're typically agreeing to a package, not individually to each term.
Standard form contracts (take it or leave it rules that are distributed to everyone) are exempt from this though (here the void part falls back to default rules).
Likewise if I take some GPL software, I can do whatever I want with it to run it, including copying it into memory. I can't give a copy to anyone else (including derivative works such as a binary) without agreeing to the GPL.
That's true, but unlike the DVD case it's so only because the GPL license explicitly grants you this right. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to run it at all.
GPL is actually kind of a special case when it comes to licenses since it mostly cares about redistribution in order to implement its copyleft mechanism, but generally licenses are tools used to give users permission to use the software under specified conditions. Without a license (written or verbal), there's no permission to do anything whatsoever.
You may be confusing it with using a self-modified copy of code under GPL. Since GPL only cares about sharing the modified source with actual users, you won't have to share your modifications with anyone as long as you remain the only user of that modified work.
What happens if you do?
Well, this is a joke decision since no one will verify whether they actually remove the code.
Obfuscation is trivial.
Its almost all based on "I wish", and not "these fact"
If you see things only in black and white and everything is a crusade, then you don’t care much about facts. I would guess that this is the result of the same mechanisms that prime a conspiracy theorist to see conspiracies everywhere.