GPL upheld in France [LWN.net]

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 19:30 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: GPL upheld in France by zotz
Parent article: GPL upheld in France

As I said on Groklaw, why shouldn't an end user sue?

Certainly in Europe, if you're not covered by the exception, when you provide a GPL binary you are either:

(a) entering into an implied contract to supply the source on request

(b) a criminal.

That means there's a contract between supplier and recipient, and a right to sue.

Cheers,
Wol

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GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 23, 2009 22:44 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, but how do you know that a piece of software is not dual licensed by the author, making the distribution legal?

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 24, 2009 8:58 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Because you wouldn't have received the GPL licensing terms with the software in such a case.

GPL upheld in France

Posted Sep 29, 2009 11:36 UTC (Tue) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

> Because you wouldn't have received the GPL licensing terms with the software in such a case.

But they didn't anyway - it had been removed, as you'd expect from a deliberate license-violator.

However, there's nothing to stop you contacting the copyright-holder to alert him to your suspicions and to ask whether your vendor is dual-licensed and entitled to supply (a derived work? ) other than under the GPL. And once you establish that it's not dual-licensed, proceed to sue the vendor yourself, if the copyright-holder isn't bothered enough to do so himself.