Copyleft Lawsuit Against Vizio Will Allow Anyone To Defend the Commons
Software Freedom Conservancy realizes the dream of ‘Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement’
When the free software movement started to make headway, proprietary software companies like Microsoft went to war against it, describing the licenses at its core (like the GPL) as “viral licenses” to scare companies off from using free software.
The GPL is a software license that coders add to their work that says, “You can do anything with this — change it, sell it, copy it, incorporate it into something else, BUT…you have to redistribute the new projects under the same terms.”
In other words, we are making a software commons — code that anyone can use and improve, but only if they agree to maintain the commons. Like any shared resource, commons need protection from freeloaders who take but do not replenish.
When Microsoft called that a “viral” proposition, they meant that participating in free software meant that they’d be legally required to maintain the commons. Microsoft didn’t want a commons — they wanted a private preserve with a big lock on the gate.
But the commons won. Microsoft — and most other tech companies — ended up embracing free software, using it, adhering to the license terms, and contributing back.
This isn’t a fairy-tale happy ending. As Mako Hill described in his brilliant 2018 LibrePlanet keynote, Big Tech found ways to comply with free licenses without giving back to the commons — they gave us “open source” and got “software freedom.”
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libby/m/mako/
Smaller tech companies couldn’t pull off that move. Most of them fell into line, but many of them just flat-out cheated, betting that no one would drag them into court.
They bet wrong. Linksys ripped off GPLed code, and in 2008, the Free Software Foundation forced them to comply with the license. That worked out great! It led to the creation of DD-WRT, a widely used free/open Wi-Fi base station firmware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc._v._Cisco_Systems,_Inc.
