GPL upheld in France [LWN.net]

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 20:38 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: GPL upheld in France

I quickly read the ruling. Here a quick summary: The "standing to sue" issue has not been addressed. The court appointed an expert to look at the software and he found that:

the software (VNC) has been modified to hide the true copyright holders, thus it is counterfeit.
the software (VNC) has been modified to include a back-door, thus it is unfit for the stated purpose.

and the court basically conclude that the client has been ripped off by the vendor, so the issue was not decided on copyright law but on standard commercial law which should apply anywhere.

The most interesting point is the reliance on an expert that actually look at the software.

to post comments

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 25, 2009 0:21 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

I also read the ruling. Indeed the court does not seem to care about copyrights here. This ordinary case is really about the (now bankrupt) EDU4 company delivering too late and lying to their customer in a number of ways - business as usual.

It is not even clear that EDU4 really tried to hide the GPL; it could be that they just did not know what they were doing and "forgot" to display the license. For their defense they claim that they would have finally done everything right if they had not been dismissed before the final deliverable, hahaha. (they were dismissed long after the deadline)

It is not clear either whether the hidden, hardcoded password was intentional or just (extremely) poor programming practice. In any case the security consequences seem to have touched a court's nerve.

By the way the contract was for setting up a number of classrooms (hardware + software).

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 26, 2009 6:19 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

The hidden hard-coded password must have been intentional - it's not just a mistake like failing to check the length of a buffer. Someone had to decide to put in a backdoor, and perhaps keeping this secret is why no GPL source was published.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Oct 3, 2009 23:31 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> The hidden hard-coded password must have been intentional - it's not just a mistake like failing to check the length of a buffer. Someone had to decide to put in a backdoor

Or someone might have decided to hardcode a password only for convenience, and then hide it just for "security". It does not mean they planned to actually use it as a backdoor. Skype is doing something like this (in a more elaborated way), and no one brought them to a court yet.