A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss a GPL enforcement case

Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by fmihaila on Friday May 12, 2017 @10:50AM (#14324414)

It is a derivative work, but selling derivatives of GPL-ed software is entirely legal and not forbidden by the GPL. Distributing binaries (regardless if for free or not) of GPL-derived software without distributing the source from which the binaries were derived (or without offering a reasonable way of getting the source on demand) is forbidden by the GPL. Moreover, the source of the derivative work must be offered under the GPL.

(Edited to add the last statement above, for clarity.)

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by Nursie on Friday May 12, 2017 @10:59AM (#14324517)

While that is true, as part of a derivative work, your users would have your source under GPL terms.

Absolutely you can sell, but your can't restrict user rights

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by singlow on Friday May 12, 2017 @11:14AM (#14324682)

This is correct - you not only must include the source code for your binary, you also must include it under the same terms as the original source code.

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by orbitingpluto on Friday May 12, 2017 @08:02PM (#14328868)

So if someone just happens to distribute the source code for Hancom Office before this is resolved in the courts, would he or she be in the free and clear?

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by fourthark on Saturday May 13, 2017 @11:29PM (#14334073)

A license can't affect the copyright of any other code. So Hancom is just in violation of the GPL and has lost its right to use Ghostscript; it's not automatically GPL'd.

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by bdowling on Sunday May 14, 2017 @05:42AM (#14334933)

This is correct. Without a license, Hancom is liable for copyright infringement of the Artifex code if it continues distributing its product. It will be forced to either buy a license or reform its product to use an alternative, but it won't be forced to release its source code.

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by memmcgee on Saturday May 13, 2017 @01:57AM (#14329715)

Probably not. It's unlikely either party will want this to go to trial so it'll probably end in a settlement where the company buys a license on top of damages.

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Re:A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss ... by fmihaila on Friday May 12, 2017 @11:16AM (#14324707)

Agreed, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

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