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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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There's a GPL compliance lawsuit where they're suing NOT as a copyright holder of contrubtor's code but as a user of the software (a 3rd party beneficiary, under contract law). The GPL was intended to give standing to users of the software, so hopeful this makes presidence.
Yes, but this suit about a different matter (access to source code) which is a user right in the license. It’s the whole point of the GPL. In this suit the users (ie. The buyers of the devices that have received the binary distribution) obviously have standing.
The problem with relicensing is that the “authors” of a creative work (remember, this is copyright law) are changing the terms of the distribution, and the authors are allowed to do that. The issue at hand is whether the person doing the changing of the terms is allowed to make this change on behalf of “the authors”.
The users may be impacted by this decision, but they are not a part of the decision making process. Hence, no standing.
What you need in a relicensing is someone that asserts (co-) authorship of the work. That’s a much taller order.
Exactly. It isn't clear if duckstations author really has permission from all contributors or rewrote those contributions he didn't have rights to change the license on. If he didn't then technically even the latest version is still GPL but it's fairly murky and I doubt shy sane person wants to fork it and have all that drama.