Its pretty obvious what I'd be doing.

GPL violations happen all the time but they rarely get caught.

> Its pretty obvious what I'd be doing.

It's really not. The GPL requirements, AFAIK, only come up if you're distributing binaries and refusing to give source to people when asked (or, in v3, if you stop people from building and running that code). The only situations I can think of where that would even come up are situations where you're no longer acting as a user. So humor me; what exactly could a user do to violate the GPL?

Not the GP and I agree that as a mere user you’d not easily violate the GPL. But even as a developer it’s less free than you seem to imply: the GPL actually requires more than just distributing the source: you must also license the modified or additional code under the GPL. If you create “derivative works” of GPL licensed software, you are not free to distribute your modified or new code under a more permissive (non-copyleft) license such as the BSD license.

Note that you can find whole textbooks on what constitutes “derivative works”, but in any case it’s much broader than just forking a library. Basically any software that integrates the GPL licensed code (other than integration by way of loosely couples interfaces communicating via other means) is a derivative work.

For example, when your enterprisy application bundles and uses a GPL library to generate PDF’s of some of its data, the enterprisy application as a whole typically becomes a derivative work, which means (11) you must distribute the source of the full application together with any binary distribution of the app and (2) that source must be licensed under GPL.

Yes, I'm well aware of the viral aspect; I was objecting specifically to the claim that a user could be restricted by the GPL.

Or give the ability to choose which PDF generator the program uses. The situation you give is completely reasonable from the perpective of what the GPL was designed to do

I think you might want to read the GPL to get a deeper understanding of how it applies. Its fairly easy to violate the GPL as a user.

We are now 3 comments deep into you claiming that users can violate the GPL, and repeatedly not explaining how they can do so when asked. Is it too much to ask for a specific example of how a user can violate the license on a piece of software using the GPL, rather than repeating the same insinuation without any substantiation?

I'm not sure it is for the vast majority of users? How do you violate the GPL by using git?