Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?
In October of 2021 the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) decided to launch what is believed to be the first significant open source lawsuit based in contract rather than in copyright.
by Luis Villa
https://blog.tidelift.com/will-the-new-judicial-ruling-in-the-vizio-lawsuit-strengthen-the-gpl
Oh, Luis. A decade and a half, he hasn't changed a bit.
He's going to have a tough row to hoe convincing a court that Vizio entered into a contract with...someone. Somewhere. Somehow.
This line of "reasoning" is something like, you drop a fifty in a parking lot, and I find it fifteen minutes after you'd driven off.
You learn of this, and claim that I'm now "under contract" to you.
The Software Freedom Law Center, or whatever they call themselves these days, is a charitable foundation dedicated to the preservation of sketchy legal reasoning, starting with the GPL.
Is Richard Stallman involved?
Seems like right up his alley.
This was my JOB for a while, you know. Shutting up the FSF.
I told someone from the SFLC that if they kept making nuisances of themselves, I was going to move all our sources to a FIDOnet BBS attached to a 1200-baud modem.
@corlin
I don't think Stallman's involved in much except taking up space and eating food that other people pay for. His star seems to have fallen quite a bit in recent years. Maybe it's just that anyone who'd be interested has already seen his act. Which hasn't changed in DECADES.
The only reason the GPL hasn't been vivisected and put into a jar of formaldehyde in some courtroom is that it's cheaper to "comply" just to shut these whimperers up.