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A comment on French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL. Parent comment

Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by tsimionescu on Monday March 04, 2024 @03:50AM (#39588333)
I believe this is coming from the developers of a piece of GPL software who want to allow proprietary extensions. However, extensions to their software must import a python module that they created to register with their software or something. They don't want to invest time in separating that module and its dependencies into a different project with a different license (some variant of the LGPL), so they choose to believe that importing a python module is somehow different from linking a C library.

From the point of view of the owner of the software, I can see how you can think that your intention matters more than the word of the license. It's wrong in a legal sense, of course, but it makes some kind of sense of you say "nah, we'd never sue for that".

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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by actionfromafar on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:00AM (#39588382)
If the writer is the only copyright holder, if they just put the exception in writing, it's still OK. Like the exception for the Linux kernel to load proprietary binaries.
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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by tsimionescu on Monday March 04, 2024 @06:04AM (#39589048)
Sure, but if the copyright holder is a foundation, you actually need some legal representative to put that in writing, a single dev writing something on GitHub wouldn't mean much, even if they are the sole maintainer.
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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by mistrial9 on Monday March 04, 2024 @10:02AM (#39591291)
IANAL that seems to be a distinction without a difference.. you say yourself "the copyright holder" then make a gray case about some entity holding legal ownership that is not the copyright holder.

first to say, the interpretation will be different in different legal regimes, but.. here in the USA, I believe that the copyright holder is the title that determines who gets the say about changes to the license.

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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by tsimionescu on Monday March 04, 2024 @10:44AM (#39591767)
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that it is fairly common for a project that has a single author and contributor to nevertheless be developed as part of an organization such as Apache. So, even if that single author is the de facto owner, they may not be the legal owner of the copyright.
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Re:French Court Issues Damages Award for Violation of GPL by dagmx on Monday March 04, 2024 @10:28AM (#39591572)
This perhaps works if a project is new.

But many projects are years and years old, with many many contributors. Getting them to relicense is a burden that they don’t see the worth in if they cannot first agree on the pessimistic interpretation of the license

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