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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

In reality the license just puts extra restrictions on distribution of the software and how derivative works can be licensed.

The copyright owner is the only person who can sue people for violating the license of the software they created.

Copyright owners are not forced to stop people from infringing their copyrights. If they want they can allow people to infringe their copyright without punishment. Sometimes they just don't care and sometimes copyright infringement can be beneficial for the owner.

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> The copyright owner is the only person who can sue people for violating the license of the software they created.

For the copyright violations, yes. But I'd imagine a skilled lawyer could make a suit against a company for a violation of the contract between the consumer and company on the grounds that the consumer knowingly bought a product that included those clauses and the company did not follow through with delivering the product as sold.

That wouldn't be a GPL suit then, it would be a warranty suit. John Deere could plausibly just refund someone for their tractor, and continue violating the GPL.

The idea that the GPL is also a contract is being tested in California. So far the federal court (which hears copyright cases) agreed to send the case back to state court (which hears contract cases).

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

"In reality the license just puts extra restrictions on distribution of the software and how derivative works can be licensed."

Actually, copyright is now implicit. There is NO right to distribute software and NO right to create derivative works. Copyright gives those rights exclusively to the copyright holder.

The GPL makes it legally possible to distribute and create derivative works. Without that license, you have no such right, and can be sued (for damages) by the copyright holder. Proving damages can be difficult.

In any case, the license is the only thing that allows that behavior. Without it, there is no right to do it, and thus restrictions are moot.

There is a fun thought experiment where one takes a copyright license and rewrite it in terms of only positive permissions. Since copyright law by default forbids everything, every aspect of a copyright license is a form of granted permission.

The GPL would then be a number of permissions similar to:

You are hereby given permission to give other people a all-permissions-granted patent license of all patents that you own, and along side that license you are given permission to include my copyrighted source code, and optionally in addition to that source code you may then add a compiled version along side that source code.

No restrictions and depending on how one want to interpret "in addition/along side", not even a condition.

> The copyright owner is the only person who can sue people for violating the license of the software they created.

This has not been established. And while there are strong economical interests in this sense… it doesn't necessarily mean they are lawful.

Have fun downvoting… Still doesn't make me wrong.

https://lwn.net/Articles/873415/

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