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...

I do greatly appreciate you talking about cases instead of leaving it at saying there isn't a part of the license and calling any discussion about it FUD.

The Cisco case was about distributing GPL binaries, not linking it with the rest of the code base and the rest of that code base then needing to be GPL. It's a standard license enforcement unrelated to the unique requirements of GPL.

The BusyBox case is probably the closest in the list, but as you already point out we didn't get a ruling to set precedent and instead got a settlement. It seems obvious what the ruling would be (to me at least), but settlement was explicitly not what is being talked about.

Bringing in French courts, they issued fines - they didn't issue the type of order this article talks about which is about releasing the entire thing involved at the time with GPL.

This isn't related to fear, uncertainty, or doubt about GPL. It's related to what has/hasn't already been ruled in the court systems handling this license before as the article skips past a bit. Even in the case we assume the courts will rule with what seems obvious (to me at least), it has a tangible difference in how these cases will be run, the assumptions they will have, and how long they will last.