> Actually, it gets worse. Here's what the GPLv2 says about termination:
> So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility:
This is called the GPL death penalty, has actually happen in the past even before the article was written.
Can we slow down with the FUD please? GPLv3 is extremely lenient with license violations and GPLv2 is not. Yet, calling it "death penalty" is absurd.
Millions of contracts have clauses for immediate termination, and often with less clear reasons than copyright violation. Plenty of free services like HN can close an account at any time and nobody calls it "death penalty".
Do we see thousands of companies suddenly losing millions because of a GPLv2 breach? Nope.
GPLv3 isn’t a useful license because it makes the use of software in automotive devices effectively impossible. And I think this is a security issue as well because the vendors still rely on very old GPLv2 versions of software and can’t update even if they wanted to.
> So if you violate the licence, it is terminated. That's it. Given that “you” may refer to a corporation, this creates the following disturbing possibility:
This is called the GPL death penalty, has actually happen in the past even before the article was written.
It is yet another thing fixed by the oft-maligned GPLv3. Samba switched to GPLv3 because of it. https://ftp.samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba...