It's not a problem of naming but of who can afford fighting a legal battle in court and who cannot.
There's been many famous episode of big companies going to court for copyright infringement. But they know they can ignore individual developers.
As an example, a very long time ago, I was ripped off by a software company for about $10k. I talked with my (rabid dog) attorney about suing them. His response: we would have to sue in a different state, where he wasn't licensed. That means I'd have to hire another attorney. While I would almost certainly win the lawsuit, once you added up my expenses to get there, I was likely to come out of it with little actual money even assuming that my costs in pursuing the lawsuit were covered (which is not guaranteed). When you take into account the time and energy I'd also have to put into it, there wasn't much chance that I'd come out ahead over just dropping the issue.
So his question was: the only reason to sue them is on principle. Financially, I'd come out behind. Can I afford to pay to stand on principle?
In my situation with my business, I could not.
We'll open source it.
so if the code owners do not care why should the companies infringing on the license.
Then there is big problems with calling it theft, as legally is it not. Infringement is not theft and in most jurisdictions (if not all) in the US you are barred from calling it theft in court.
They are business association much like BSA, and less of an Open Source Steward these days and it is highly concerning the number of open source projects they hovering up under their "protection"
Praat would actually be a good candidate with just 2 people contributing majority of the code.
Record labels argued in court that each song shared in p2p networks that was downloaded at least once entitled them to statutory 150k USD in damages. Using that same logic Praat authors could demand 150k per release of voice.ai software at the very least.
In fact I would really like them to do that - it would fund further development of Praat at least and set a precedent showing that GPL != public domain, which seems to be the perception of many companies including large corporations, simply because nobody will care to enforce it.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
devil's advocate
Why should they? The original point of the GPL was to be the anti-copyright, the copyleft. The original point was to prevent companies suing individual developers, not to be some sort of gotcha for developers to sue companies. GPL is a shield, not a sword. Why would a company care about using GPL code in their proprietary products? It's fair use. Oracle vs Google proved it. You have no rights over code you released for free, and nobody is going to side with you as a developer suing to protect those rights. Everyone sees it as a bait and switch.
The preamble to GPL v1: "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html
To Google v Oracle, that was IIUC down to APIs usage being fair-use, not the code itself.
That isn't what happened in that court case, less what it "proved." Fair use is highly dependent on the specific details of the usage. Before it was ruled fair use, the specific kind of code in question in that case (headers/API definitions) was ruled, and long believed to be, ineligible for copyright.
> GPL is a shield, not a sword.
Imagine explaining a soldier that they don't need to worry about being bashed to death with a shield because it a shield was designed to block blows.
Like the purpose for which the GPL was created is irrelevant to how it's being used, and people who are aware and desire to mitigate risks will be mindful of that.
Please don't. "Theft" is something very different. We're talking about contract violations.
> Instead, get a pitbull of a lawyer,
This is a piece of advice I give to everyone starting their own business anyway. Have a attorney, and it should be the meanest attorney you can find. Especially if you're a nice person.
If neither of those were true (let's say it was company secret source code, which was never licensed, but a copy was obtained and used anyway), would it still be a contract violation?
Not because of that, no. It's a contract violation because there is a contract of sorts (the license agreement). If the code was obtained through hacking, breaking and entering, etc., then we would be talking about theft.
> Or because there was a license that could be used without signing?
It is not necessary to sign something in order to enter into a contractual relationship. There is some gray area in terms of whether or not specific sorts of licensing is legally effective (click-wrap agreements, etc.), but the principle holds generally.
A license is type of contract. If you are using something under the terms of a license, violating the terms of that license is a kind of contract violation.
> If neither of those were true (let's say it was company secret source code, which was never licensed, but a copy was obtained and used anyway), would it still be a contract violation?
No, there is no license there. It's hard to say what, if any, violation there is in that case without knowing the specifics of the case. It could be a copyright violation. If the code was actually stolen, then it could be theft or receiving stolen property. Or it could simply not be a violation.
IANAL, by the way. I'm just relating my understanding of things. I could be wrong.
I would assume that it also takes a certain scale to be able to manage things well in this regard. There's a nasty gap in between one person and ten people, made far worse if the company needs to hit a milestone yesterday or cease to exist.
I'm sure that these violations are 100x more common than they appear, and that most of the culprits go out of business for unrelated reasons before anyone notices. Even when stealing to get a head start, running a successful business is hard.
Maybe it'd help to instead call it "IP theft", which still sounds a bit serious.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know exactly how this would work, but something like the following seems interesting...
In those cases in which IP theft appears to be intentional or grossly negligent, don't respond like a nonprofit flowerchild bringing peace and love to someone who simply didn't know. Instead, get a pitbull of a lawyer, to make the perpetrator actually regret it.
Which, for startups that made claims to investors regarding ownership/rights to the IP they used, could then trigger an additional concern: defrauding investors.
Then, after news of companies sorely regretting IP theft, a lot of companies proactively ban IP-theft-laundering tools like Copilot. And the companies that keep using tools like Copilot (or who don't excise existing stolen IP code quick enough, before forensic tools catch up, and catch them), start getting called to account by the pitbulls.