Be sure to read the top comment where someone who claims to have worked for the company provides some inside information.

In my experience, this is quite common when the development of hardware is viewed as a cost center and is outsourced to various providers and teams. Those providers and teams churn a lot and nobody who worked on that is likely still involved with the company via contracts or direct employment.

Front line support people aren’t equipped to respond to these requests. If you’re lucky they’ll get bounced around internally while project managers play hot potato with the e-mail until it gets forgotten. You might get lucky if you go the corporate legal route, but more likely is that the lawyers will do the math on the likelihood of you causing them actual legal trouble for anything and decide it’s best to ignore it.

When I worked at a company that had a history of GPL drama one of the first things I did was enforce a rule that every release had a GPL tarball that was archived and backed up. We educated support people on where to forward requests. I handled them myself. 7 out 10 times, the person on the other end was angry because they assumed the GPL entitled them to all of our source code and they were disappointed when they only found GPL code in the tarball. It really opened my eyes to some of the craziness you get exposed to with these requests (though clearly not the polite and informed request in this Reddit thread) which is probably another reason why support staff are uneasy about engaging with these requests.

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teddyh 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> 7 out 10 times, the person on the other end was angry because they assumed the GPL entitled them to all of our source code and they were disappointed when they only found GPL code in the tarball.

Well, if your non-GPL code was directly linked to, or closely interoperated with, any GPL code, those users would have been right.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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juped 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Richard Stallman is wrong about linking.

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teddyh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As far as I understand it, Richard Stallman has gotten his view about linking from FSF’s lawyers, who has advised the FSF about what does and does not count as a “derived work”, in the sense of US copyright law.

If you want to argue that the FSF’s lawyers are wrong, please provide more detailed, and hopefully referenced, arguments (as opposed to plain assertions).

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abigail95 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

FSF has opinions but not case law - anyone else's opinion is as valid, there's no citation because no court has ruled that dynamic linking is or isn't a derivative work.

You have to construct your own view based on existing statute and vaguely related cases.

Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021) is not a pro-FSF opinion.

Whether linking (dynamic or not) is a derivative work is defined by things like incorporation, similarity, and creative expression.

I think the FSF view is unreasonably confident in its public opinions where the current law is that each potential infraction is going to be decided on a case by case basis. Read 17 USC 101 for yourself and square that with FSF/Stallman opinions.

There's too much nuance to have a stance about what happens when you link a program. "It depends" is the only thing you can say.

	▲	immibis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		until you actually sue them, all you have are guesses, and you miss all shots you don't take

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SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would point towards Oracle v. Rimini, where the Ninth Circuit has specifically ruled (inside a complex and yet-unresolved case) that a system built to interoperate with a copyrighted program does not constitute a derivative work of that program. (https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/12/16/2...)

They reference a less on point but better known case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin...., for some reason you have to manually add the period at the end of the link) about whether NES cheat cartridges were copyright infringement. If a work that directly links to and interoperates with a program is a derivative work of that program, the Game Genie really was illegal after all. To me that doesn't seem right, and given the FSF's general opinion on console restrictions (https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2025/winter/new-nintendo-drm-ba...) I kinda feel like they'd have to agree.

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abigail95 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Galoob is terrible for the FSF because it provides for a program that only exists to enhance another.

That doesn't fit into the dynamic linking absolutists worldview at all.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ehh, I'm not sure it's fair to call the FSF dynamic linking absolutists. They only care about any of this because they've boxed themselves into a corner. They want to prevent people from writing proprietary wrappers around copyleft programs, but they don't want a license so restrictive that proprietary and copyleft programs are forbidden from interacting, and Freedom 0 means they can't explicitly prohibit a copyleft program from being used for suchandsuch purpose.