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German Court Finds Fantec Responsible For GPL Violation On Third-Party Code
ectoman writes "Are firms responsible for GPL violations on code they receive from third parties? A German court thinks so. The Regional Court of Hamburg recently ruled that Fantec, a European media player maker, failed to distribute 'complete corresponding source code' for firmware found in some of its products. Fantec claims its third-party firmware supplier provided the company with appropriate source code, which Fantext made available online. But a hackathon organized by the Free Software Foundation Europe discovered that this source code was incomplete, and programmer Harald Welte filed suit. He won. Mark Radcliffe, an IP expert and senior partner at DLA Piper who specializes in open source licensing issues, has analyzed the case—and argued that it underscores the need for companies to implement internal GPL compliance processes. 'Fantec is a reminder that companies should adopt a formal FOSS use policy which should be integrated into the software development process,' he writes. 'These standards should include an understanding of the FOSS management processes of such third-party suppliers. The development of a network of trusted third-party suppliers is critical part of any FOSS compliance strategy.'"
It probably wouldn't have cost them as much as most likely it would have been settled out of court without the need for lawyers and court fees, the BSA just wants to get paid after all and will negotiate,whereas with the GPL there is NO negotiation nor compromise because like it or not that is the way RMS designed the license.
What I personally don't get when it comes to these cases is...why? Why would you bother taking the risk of using GPL code when you aren't a FOSS company and risk possible lawsuits like this? If you don't want to be a FOSS company there is BSD and there is plenty of proprietary solutions so there is really no damned point in taking the risk when your company isn't a FOSS based company. After all BSD is good enough for fricking Apple and the PS4 so its not like its not got plenty of support, so seriously they should get an extra 40% tacked on to the verdict as a "You're a dumbass" penalty for wasting all that money when there was no damned need to take the risk.
Does this make GPL bad? Nope, but one would have to be blind not to see you really need to base a company around FOSS if you are gonna be using it as it doesn't play nice with proprietary, again by design, but as long as your business makes its money by using one of what I call the "blessed three" models by which pretty much all GPL businesses are based, selling support/services, selling hardware (like this company) or holding out the tin cup? Then there is no problem with you handing out the source and thus no issues with GPL. Its when these companies try to mix GPL and proprietary that it bites them in the ass.
So the moral of the story is thus...if you are gonna use GPL make sure its no problem for your company to abide by the terms, otherwise choose something else. These cases show that stealing GPL code will end up costing you no different than if you stole proprietary code because as far as the courts are concerned its one and the same. Just because its "free as in beer" doesn't mean its "free as in do what you will", that is what the BSD license is for.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You publish your code. It might get used. Deal with it.
Ah, then by that logic, we can ignore all copyright laws. Eureka!
To be perfectly clear: I would rather a world where labor to create a work is done and paid for once, and the infinite monopoly granted to any who refuse to work without assurance of pay would be applied to content creation as it is in all other labor fields. Yes, I would rather a world where no copyrights existed at all; Where to get more money you would have to do more work instead of sell more copies which are infinitely reproducible and thus valueless: // regardless of cost to create.
Econ101: infinite supply == zero price;
Not monetizing copies but the work which yields their infinite supply instead is actually how the open source model of software production operates. As a car mechanic or home builder or burger joint would: I do an estimate, agree on a price for the new work (code | feature | installation | maintenance | etc.), then do the work once and get paid once for it, then seek more projects to do more work to get paid further. Instead of the insanity of selling ice to Eskimos -- or 1's and 0's to folks with computers -- I get paid proportional to my work.
Conversely, since copyright does exist, I am not free to utilize any other available configuration of 1's and 0's already created and thus in infinite supply. In response to the ridiculous state of copyright whereby I am disadvantaged by my sane work practice and since I do not foolishly work for free then gamble my livelihood in the closed source copyright futures market -- A market where the work can go underpaid or unpaid if the market value didn't match the demand leading to job insecurity, and whereby the publisher middle men can drain the consumers of orders of magnitude more wealth than the cost to create the work (see how that works? The workers are disadvantaged, yes?); In response for being held to these ridiculous laws in order to make a living in society I choose to assert that my end users have all the rights and capabilities granted to any others who would monetize my work. Unable to rid the world of all copyrights, I expect businesses to obey them as I must. I merely expect that the business community enriched with unbounded advantages provided by GPL'd code not disadvantage me by disallowing my future work upon projects such code makes possible.
Now, perhaps you are feckless enough to assume I can simply ignore copyrights if I want. Perhaps you assume a person can have security in their future while their small business breaks copyright laws at will, and allows others to close off future job opportunities by not releasing source code as the contract under which the work was performed would require. Perhaps you would say: "Just deal with bad actors making a less of a viable future for you." Perhaps you would say the blame lies with me for publishing my code in the first place, and ignore all the other compliant businesses which my work bolsters all of at once and I thus thrive upon. Perhaps you would think we allow ever more egregious infringement of the open source copyrights to proliferate while allowing the brutal punishing of end users for minor copyright infringements against proprietary licensors. Perhaps you would say, that I "might get used. Deal with it.", and then ignore that dealing with it is exactly what is being done in TFA...
Why would you take the risk of using proprietary code? Most proprietary vendors have lawyers on retainer and tend to be less forgiving of violations.
If you read TFA you'll see that this is not their first time violating the GPL on the plaintiff's code. The first time, they were allowed to correct the error and sign an agreement that they wouldn't let it happen again. There was a monetary penalty attached to further violations. They did, in fact, violate the licence on the same software AGAIN. They were offered the opportunity to correct the error, pay the agreed upon penalty and call it good, but they refused. Then and only then did they get sued.
How often do you get one for free when violating a proprietary license?
The fact is, most of the time GPL authors will be satisfied if you simply correct the error that they point out. Particularly if it looks like it was simply an error.