Charlie Brady wrote: > Or any test cases? This question seems to point to a rather typical confusion about GPL. The "test cases" for GPL are rarely about the license itself, at least not directly. They are copyright infringement cases, where the violator has to argue GPL compliance as a defense; the copyright holder doesn't need to prove the (to use the word of this subthread) validity of GPL to claim copyright infringement; the violator has to show that copyright infringement didn't occur.
Perhaps you're asking the question of "has a violator, upon being sued for copyright infringement on a GPL'd work, ever argued that the made an offer and their offer was 'valid' even though they didn't honor the offer when contacted?". I think my answer to that question is: I don't recall that argument being made by any violator I've dealt with in litigation. In fact, rarely do companies try to argue the nuances of licenses as a defense. If you read the proceedings of, say, Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy et al., you'll see that most of the arguments by the other side are to throw lots of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Most of that spaghetti tries to hint that Erik Andersen didn't actually write any of BusyBox -- a claim which is false on its face to everyone in our community, but a claim that I've spent months of my life disputing in expert reports. The goal of these wealthy GPL violators is to outspend us in litigation and bury us in paperwork. > Perhaps there would be less of that if the GPL had required delivery or > posting of source code, rather than just an "offer". Make sure to pay attention to the words in GPLv2§3(b) and GPLv3§6(b) that talk about the "valid offer". In other words, those sections *do* require delivery of CCS! What text in GPL makes you think they don't require delivery of the CCS? As for "posting" the CCS, all versions of the GPL were specifically designed to *not* require public posting of CCS, but to only require CCS be delivered to anyone who is in possession of the binaries (or, in GPLv2's case, who is aware of the offer). Requiring public release of CCS for all distributed binaries -- while many companies chose to do it and such should be encouraged -- shouldn't be mandatory, and making it mandatory would change the nature of the license, and possible make it not a Free Software license anymore. > Is there any legal definition of "valid"? Certainly one could look up 'valid' in Black's Law Dictionary (which would likely give you a useful USA-centric legal answer), but it probably isn't helpful here, for reasons I point out above. The word 'valid' by itself doesn't make a major change to the meaning of GPL, but an incremental one. Sure, saying the offer has to be 'valid' helps make it clear that an offer is non-compliant when it doesn't yield CCS to the requestor. But I think the offer would still be non-compliant (i.e., a defendant wouldn't succeed in arguing they didn't infringe copyright by making an offer and failing to honor it) if the word 'valid' wasn't there at all. Be careful not to think about GPL like it's some Program to be run on a virtual machine called the 'Law' that yields some result when you ask it questions. GPL enforcement just doesn't work that way, even if we wish it did. -- -- bkuhn
