251–260 of 543 posts
I've always wondered if these license are legally enforceable. What if TikTok ignores the criticism and does nothing. Do the developers sue the company and will they get any money?
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Probably they are employed at companies who are themselves violating GPL and have seen this being done there.
How do you think companies end up violating GPL. Maybe sometimes it's a heartless executive, but a lot of enterprise software devs are completely unconcerned with licenses. If they can get their hands on it, the license doesn't matter.
As a result of this, I think there's this mass misunderstanding of how licenses work in the software engineering field.
[1] With the exception of AGPL if I understand correctly.
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> The use of the word "illegal" seems problematic if this is a contractual dispute over (GPL) license terms No, it's not. > No one seems to be claiming that TikTok actually committed a criminal act “Criminal” is not the same as “illegal”, the latter includes any violation of law whether or not it is criminal.
This definitely looks like egregious and apparently intentional infringement, but violating the GPL is not violating a law in most countries; it's violating a license agreement. Contracts are not law. Therefore, violating the GPL by itself probably isn't illegal (but it could probably become illegal if other statutes, like CFAA or RICO were brought into play.) If I violate deed restrictions on my property by building…
If they're not following the license, then aren't they breaking copyright laws?
In almost all cases, TikTok's offering would be considered a derived work because you cannot swap out the OBS part for another and still have it work. So they are likely in full violation unless they agree to open source all their code. Seems like a pretty open and shut case to be honest - that is, if they intend to pursue legal action and the powers that be rule appropriately.
I'm out of my depth here, but what makes you say they can't swap out the OBS part for something else? Do you mean they can't swap it without modifying the rest of the code, or can't swap it at all?
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Then it's not an open source software license.
I suspect you're conflating Free, Libre, and Open-Source Software. The first can be free (as in beer), the second free (as in you can do whatever you please with it), and the last is that the source is publicly available. GP's proposition would be Open-Source, but not FLOSS IIUC
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Well, you've been misled. https://transparencyreport.google.com
If they're equally influenced by their national governments, perhaps you can also direct us to ByteDance's own transparency report, so we can compare?
It's concerning how many self-labelled software engineers on Twitter are chipping in with comments like "it's open source so it's fair game" or "they just need to add attribution".
It's reminiscent of people adding "no copyright intended" (sic) when posting other people's music online. It seems like intuitions about copyright have been shifting, even if the law hasn't.
I think people actually know it's wrong and legally questionable.
I believe they do it because they simply want to do it and in the back of their minds, hope adding some bogus disclaimer will let them get away with it... because other people seem to be getting away with it.
How can you be so inept that you're literally stealing software, but are too incompetent to properly obfuscate it?
Probably there is also a little spike in the logs of obsproject.org which could lead to some investigation.