I know it's not popular on HN to have anything but supportive statements around GPL, and I'm a big GPL supporter myself, but there is nuance in what is being said here.

That case was important, but it's not abojt the virality. There have been no concluded court cases involving the virality portion causing the rest of the code to also be GPL'd, but there are plenty involving enforcement of GPL on the GPL code itself.

The distinction is important because the article is about the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd, not just about the GPL'd code itself.

I'd like to think it wouldn't be a problem to enforce, but I've also never seen a court ruling truly about the virality portion to back that up either - which is all GP is saying.

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omnicognate 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no "virality", and the article's use of "propagation" to mean the same thing is wrong. The GPL doesn't "cause" anything to be GPLed that hasn't been explicitly licensed under the GPL by the owner of its copyright. The GPL grants a license to use the copyright material to which it applies. To satisfy the terms of that license for a particular use may require that you license other code under the GPL, but if you don't the GPL can't magically make that code GPLed. You will, however, not be covered by the license so unless your use is permitted for some other reason (eg. fair use or a different license you have been granted) your use of the the original code will be a violation of copyright. All of this has been repeatedly tested in court.

It's sad to see Microsoft's FUD still festering 20 years later.

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pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not Microsoft FUD, you're describing the license as viral too, but playing with words. The fact is that if you include GPL'd stuff in your stuff, that assemblage has to conform to the GPL's rules.

You're basically saying "the GPL doesn't go back in time and relicense unrelated code." But nobody was ever claiming it does, and describing it as "viral" doesn't imply that it does. It's "viral" because code that you stick to it has to conform to its rules. It's good that the GPL is viral. I want it to be viral, I don't want people to be able to hide GPL'd code in a proprietary structure.

	▲	omnicognate an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist. What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you are allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone either: * using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or * coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that). If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3]. As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you literally said, in these exact words, "the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc..... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits [3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wa...