How Companies Avoid Sharing GPL Source Code

Source code licensing can be very complex and because of this there are loop holes which can arise with GPL style licenses where companies can completely avoid sharing the source code.

Remember I'm not a lawyer, seek a professional for actual legal advice

==========Support The Channel==========

==========Resources==========

=========Video Platforms==========

==========Social Media==========

==========Credits==========
🎨 Channel Art:
All my art has was created by Supercozman

#GPL #Linux #SourceCode #FOSS

🎵 Ending music

DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[Kyuunex]

Imagine arranging a meeting with the dev team, across the world, flying over, only to be handed the source code printed on 100s of A4 papers with font Comic Sans.

I've seen completely opposite approach from corporates towards free software and that is they do not want to touch it with a ten foot pole. E.g. Using GCC to compile commercial software, even though there is an exception explicitly allowing that in the GCC license, they do not trust that somewhere in the source that went into compiling the tool chain isn't a tiny bit that could cost them a law suit, so it is way more acceptable to buy commercial tool chain.

[lvmlvm]

Naomi Wu has a video where shoe goes to the offices of a Chines phone maker to demand the GPL v2 code in the kernel of their phone, and actually yells at them.
She seems to have made some progress there...

That said, it would be interesting to hear of actual examples where companies demanded users who want GPL code had to come to their office.
I have not heard of such a case, but I would not be surprised if it did happen.

[spaceguybob]

As I know google forms to make a MIT or BSD license then forks that to make proprietary code. I may be wrong but this is what I take with the knowledge I have about chromium vs chrome and chromium is vs chrome os

[terrydaktyllus]

1:18 You indeed have a very talented teleporting cat on the bed behind you.

[abarratt]

GPL’s weakness is that no binary distribution means no rights to source code.

The Linux world had a warning of this when GR Security warned that it’d not distribute new binaries to customers who themselves had distributed the source code for a previous version of their patches. Bruce Perens made some fuss about it which has back fired because RedHat are now doing the same thing. Guess where they got the idea…

Linux didn’t, indeed couldn’t do anything about it because it is a built in weakness.

GPL is a massive liability for projects that want to guarantee that all forks remain publicly available. It was never fit for the purpose widely supposed to be guaranteed by it. The authors of GPL weren’t as clever as they thought.

The best thing for projects to do if there is a private fork out there that they don’t like is to stop distribution to the fork owner. For example the LKP could stop downstreaming to RedHat.

[StarlordStavanger]

You can always tell now between a newer vs older recorded video by the haircut in the video :P

[rylaczero]

Maybe what we need is traceability built into these libraries that marks parts used in binary as GPL and is ignored by obfusscators. Then we will need some tool that that does the job of detecting use of a GPL automatically.

[nommindymple]

I wonder where the source code is for SteamOS 3.0.

[samscomet]

Question, if you can isolate the usage of the GPL licensed software in your project to a couple components, can you just share those 2 components on a repo somewhere and keep everything else private?

[kmmmsyr]

It would be also funny if the source code had a separate download that had a max download speed too slow it would take a few years to complete.

[rkvkydqf]

Please do a video about cloud browsers. The modern web is so bloated people are willing to stream Google Chrome from powerful servers for a monthly fee.

[FunNooberCodingForBeginners]

This shows how greedy companies are. They will go to the greatest lengths to avoid helping competetion.

[matthiasbenaets]

The haircut timeline is all over the place the past 2 week :')

[igorgiuseppe]

what about dual licencing?
instead of creating an "GPL 4" an project can use either GPL2 or 3, but include another licence that specify the distribution methods and their minimum convenience?

[shanent]

Is making code distribution tedious still relevant? Why not just make an open source shim driver that links to copyleft code, and which interfaces with the closed source components through some opaque protocol.

[kaboom]

4:50 you repeat yourself here

interesting video though :)

[fuseteam]

Missed opportunity to say "pushing and stretching the definition as much as it's legally possible"

[jortz]

Naomi from the channel sexycyborg made a video a couple months ago where she visited some company's headquarters in china demanding their GPL v2 source-code, lol.

[esra_erimez]

Brodie is not a lawyer, but he is a fortune teller. He foresaw Red Hat's shenanigans.