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Comment by zipy124 | Hacker News Reader

It's become rather clear that Open source licenses are vulnerable, since defending them costs large amount of money, and proving violations can be hard since by definition the products that break them are closed-source.

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Software Freedom Conservancy is at least fighting back.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...

I am annoyed that they just claim that "reverse engineering" will take care of this, instead of really trying to fight back legally.

This is a social problem, and reverse engineering can only help up to a point.

They are likely pretty busy with their lawsuit against Vizio, which is going to trial in August and would set a very interesting precedent if won.

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

I think the Vizio lawsuit will set a more narrow precedent than the SFC wants. The tentative ruling the judge in that case made in December (not binding, but represents the judge's current understanding of the case going into the trial) is that Vizio has a contractual obligation to provide the GPL source code for the TV the SFC bought because the TV has an offer to provide source code upon request buried in one of the menus. The tentative ruling doesn't cover what happens if a company doesn't offer to provide source code. In the future, a company that uses GPL code without a source code offer could argue that third-party GPL beneficiaries have no grounds to sue because there's no contract being violated, and this would take another lawsuit to resolve.

That was my impression, as well, but I recently met SFC people and they assured me that the judge is taking the third party beneficiary doctrine very seriously, it‘s not off the table. Funnily, because Vizio objected to the tentative ruling, it has little meaning now.

The trial in August will handle the TPB stuff, as well. It will be streamed, btw.

Nice, I'm glad to hear that.

A legal battle is expensive and time consuming. For example they have been fighting one with Visio since 2021[0]. It’s going to court this year.

I’m not sure how well tested AGPL has been tested in court, but assuming it has, the SFC has the right to reverse engineer anything covered by the license. That will help people sooner than trying to get a court to make a decision.

Open source for medium and small projects is dead if enforcement is a consideration. Trivial to reimplement in same or other language and give yourself plausible deniability.

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