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A comment on Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents. Parent comment

Re:Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents by jcims on Monday August 23, 2021 @04:56AM (#28273640)
The same thing could be said for software licensing, couldn’t it?
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Re:Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents by GuB-42 on Monday August 23, 2021 @06:08AM (#28273929)
No GPL without software licensing. And no Linux without GPL.

By requiring the source to be available with the software, licenses drove the free software movement.

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Re:Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents by pydry on Monday August 23, 2021 @07:18AM (#28274268)
GPL also wouldnt be needed without software licensing.

No reason Linux couldnt exist. All software would effectively be FOSS by default.

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Re:Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents by GuB-42 on Monday August 23, 2021 @09:54AM (#28275737)
Free but not open source.

GPL is here to make sure the source code doesn't stay secret, and it is an essential part of the Linux development process, the driver model in particular. In fact, I don't see how a community driven, widely supported, monolithic kernel could be made without a copyleft license.

Linux without GPL wouldn't be Linux, and out of the free OSes (BSD, GNU/HURD, Haiku, Minix, ...), Linux is the most successful.

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Re:Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents by pydry on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:29AM (#28286321)
If every employee of your company were able to take and release your source code anyway the GPL couldnt really make things more open.
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