My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

Re:My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [li... by bawolff on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:30AM (#44462047)

> If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.

I think you can notice that output looks similar, error messages are similar, etc. If the program is non-trivial its usually pretty obvious if its a copy or a reimplementation.

If it sounds plausible, presumably you could sue and read the source in discovery (ianal, not sure precisely how that works)

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Re:My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [li... by crystaln on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:52AM (#44462205)

Being obvious to a developer poking at a product is quite disparate from successfully bringing a lawsuit involving source discovery.

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Re:My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [li... by tombert on Friday July 04, 2025 @11:48AM (#44465553)

There plenty of things that won’t make a noticeable difference in the output, especially in libraries.

Let’s suppose I make a slight more efficient implementation of green threads, for example. I do not see how that would affect the output in a way that would be obvious, even if the library is non-trivial. Even if I slapped it with a GPL, I don’t see how I would realistically be able to check if they broke the license without first auditing the code, which I couldn’t do without a discovery request, which I likely wouldn’t have grounds for even if I could afford the lawyers for a lawsuit.

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