It could turn out that copyright is only enforceable if it involves payment or authorship.
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.
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.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-Klausel
The referenced article is §32 UrhG
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.
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 "You agree to pay 1 Trillion dollars if you do not publish your changes".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.