from Hacker News

French court issues damages award for violation of GPL

by bookstore-romeo on 3/4/24, 5:40 AM with 434 comments

• by Arech on 3/4/24, 7:30 AM

  > Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010

  How such a simple thing could take 14 years to untangle?

  How could anyone trust in courts that have such a spectacular efficiency?

• by nottorp on 3/4/24, 9:34 AM

  One thing to note is that the library was also available for commercial licensing from the start. Makes it easy to demonstrate harm and establish damages.

  Now we need two more landmark cases:

  - one that awards damages for a pure GPL library that doesn't have commercial licensing available

  - one that exonerates some company that is LGPL compliant but is sued by the likes of Digia in hope of squeezing some money out of them

• by asah on 3/4/24, 7:22 AM

  The headline implies a win, but I'm not so sure... $820K USD isn't a deterrent and to the plaintiffs, it's minus 100s of hours, distraction and legal fees which will be high given the complexity.

• by allywilson on 3/4/24, 7:21 AM

  > Orange used the Lasso software in the solution, but did not pass on the rights to its modifications free of charge under GPL, or make the source code to its modifications available.

  Has Orange now made the modified code available? The artice doesn't mention that.

• by noname120 on 3/4/24, 8:06 AM

  Primary source: https://www.courdecassation.fr/decision/65cdbcdf2425a7000825...

  Orange has to pay €860k[1] (≈ $934k) + lawyer fees to Entr'Ouvert.

  [1] €500k + €150k + €150k + €60k = €860k

• by neilv on 3/4/24, 8:46 AM

  The first sentence on "https://lasso.entrouvert.org/" starts:

  > Lasso is a free software C library [...]

  I wish people would stop saying "free software".

  It was confusing from the beginning, and hasn't stopped being confusing.

  Imagine RMS saying, "I'm glad you asked that. By 'free', we don't mean free as in beer (nor what everyone means when they search for some kind of 'free software'); we mean free as in freedom. Which I will proceed to speak about for half an hour, now that you're engaged by this small bit of wordplay that you had no reason to suspect was wordplay."

  (Not that the ambiguity of "free software" was the cause of the Orange violation of Lasso. But, really, please stop calling it "free". Say "GPL", or some other license, or "libre", or anything other than "free".)

• by maelito on 3/4/24, 7:54 AM

  Just set my code on one project from MIT to GPL, since it's a personal project without public funding. I was expecting this kind of consequences if someone breaches the license, I'm glad it's the case.

• by guappa on 3/4/24, 7:00 AM

  > The Court of Cassation, which is the supreme court of France, reviewed the case and issued an order on October 5, 2022 overturning the decision of the Court of Appeal. The case was then remanded to the Court of Appeal, which issued its order this week.

  I know nothing of france's legal procedures, but it seems strange that the lower court, after being ordered something, could drag its feet for so long.

• by tovej on 3/4/24, 8:12 AM

  It sounds like the reason it took so long was that they had to decide whether this was a copyright claim or a breach of contract claim.

  Could someone more versed on license law clarify this, at first glance it seems like an obvious breach of contract if they've just used the entire Lasso library and not followed the license. Was orange copying specific parts of the library and hoping nobody notices?

• by dagmx on 3/4/24, 7:50 AM

  I’m glad there’s finally some cases setting precedent for the GPL.

  I am personally not a fan of GPL family licenses BUT I am sick of fellow OSS developers who keep telling me not to worry about the minutiae of the license. (Usually some form of “Oh don’t worry because we aren’t litigious right now, as long as you stick with our incorrect interpretation of the license”)

  My team is responsible for a lot of corporate contributions to open source (some GPL) and I have to pay extra attention to the license terms as a result.

  There’s a lot of GPL software that operates in the grey (and many OSS devs who don’t understand their license choices), and I very much like my licenses to be as black and white as possible so I can avoid any risk.

  Having legal precedence to point to will help make concerns concrete.

• by kilolima on 3/4/24, 10:06 PM

  For the first time, I can see the advantage of AI for a forum like HN. Have the AI scan the comments and generate a summary and links to show/hide, as an example:

  80% of comments are pedantic. 10% of comments discuss the actual topic. 5% of comments are excited/hopeful. 30% of comments are probable astroturfing. 20% of comments are by users who are most likely millenials. 1% of comments are by former /.'ers. etc.

  Ideally this could just run locally and operate on any website as needed, like browser userscripts now.

• by brudgers on 3/4/24, 3:26 PM

  Entr’Ouvert sued Orange in 2010

  Your license choice matters based on your wherewithal to litigate upon bad actors.

  And your license choice segments good actors into those who will and won't use your software.

  The rest is theory.

• by keepamovin on 3/4/24, 9:13 AM

  Seems it would have simply been prudent for company to have obtained a commercial OSS exemption. And if not offered to have requested one. Shady undertones that companies seem almost to want to use OSS without ever raising that commercial issue, as if sneaking around hoping the authors will never wise up to their rights—just to save a few bucks?

  Breach of contract.

• by jiveturkey on 3/4/24, 9:26 PM

  Have there been any other cases of GPL violations where damages were awarded?

  I found https://gpl-violations.org/news/ from another commentor but from there I count only 2 judgements and no mention of remedy.

• by williamDafoe on 3/4/24, 6:54 PM

  Should be retitled. "pyrrhic victory might cover some of the legal costs"...

• by shoubidouwah on 3/4/24, 12:47 PM

  Naively, if a model is smart enough to spit / whitewash a bit of code, it is also smart enough to add attribution, isn't it? Wouldn't correct attribution be just a master prompt line away?

• by sidewndr46 on 3/4/24, 4:41 PM

  From what I can tell this is a judgment against some sort of government services provider. So the damages will just end up being paid by the citizens via taxation.

• by iamstupid on 3/4/24, 2:30 PM

  Doesn't this contradict EU law? Specifically this: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-l...

  I guess the fact that the software was also offered with a commercial license could be considered that it prejudices the legitimate interest of the author of the library. IANAL, but I think this might be a one-off (most GPL libraries do not have a commercial license alternative, so...).

• by picadores on 3/4/24, 1:38 PM

  Up Next: Ambulance chasers offering there services to GPL projects.. the hunt begins.

• by hyperthesis on 3/4/24, 8:52 AM

  €650,000

• by JonChesterfield on 3/4/24, 11:14 AM

  Surprised it's not mentioned already.

  OpenAI recently fed everything on GitHub into a language model which will cheerfully reproduce GPL'd software without license or attribution.

  I think that's the end of "free software" in the GPL sense. There is zero point to writing AGPL on a program if copying it into a language model and then back out into a text file without the license is a legitimate thing to do.

  I can't imagine this being countered effectively by lawsuit. Microsoft has built a weapon that they can use to disassemble open source software, I think they'll take the legal side of that seriously enough that GPL will be a distant memory by the time the courts conclude in either direction.

• by iLoveOncall on 3/4/24, 9:18 AM

  Licenses is really a cancer that the open source world never needed.

  If I release my code, it's with the license "do whatever the fuck you want". Otherwise I wouldn't release it.