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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

It is not company property.

But it's the company's legal department which would evaluate that claim. Because it's a legal claim. Licenses aren't magic spells, they're social agreements and non-executive employees don't want to get in trouble for making executive decisions.

That really depends. A company can still own the copyright to the code that they’ve written, even if it’s licensed with GPL. It’s an asset that is transferred if the company is sold, etc, so yes, it’s actually company property.

The GPL grants rights to use and distribute, but does not grant ownership. It’s not suddenly in the public domain.

Support staff or even engineers are not in a position to be making that call. It’s a legal department decision, even if it seems obvious to you.

This should be the most upvoted answer.

Yeah there are are startups where head guys don’t know that and developers jump the gun because they feel like they’re ones that have the best understanding of the issue at hand.

But of course that’s legal territory.

I agree that a front-line CSR or even engineer is not likely the right person, but surely then the responsible action is to redirect the request to the responsible department or person?

Absolutely, and companies that routinely get requests like this train customer service agents on specific trigger words like "license" or "GDPR" that must be redirected. Without that training, it's not obvious why "it's GPLv2 licensed" is more compelling than the last customer's argument that the device warranty obligates you to drop everything and immediately fix the minor UI bug they reported.

Derivative works are owned by those who create them. What copyright says you can do with them depends on the specifics, but the general case is true.

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