Big Win for GNU GPL in France

One of the fallback positions for purveyors of FUD is that the GNU GPL may not be valid, because it hasn't been properly tested in court. That's getting increasingly implausible as a stance. After being upheld in Germany a few times, here's a big decision in its favour in France:

In a landmark ruling that will set legal precedent, the Paris Court of Appeals decided last week that the company Edu4 violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when it distributed binary copies of the remote desktop access software VNC but denied users access to its corresponding source code. The suit was filed by Association pour la formation professionnelle des adultes (AFPA), a French education organization.

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The events of the case go back to early 2000, when Edu4 was hired to provide new computer equipment in AFPA's classrooms. Shortly thereafter, AFPA discovered that VNC was distributed with this equipment. Despite repeated requests, with mediation from the Free Software Foundation France, Edu4 refused to provide AFPA with the source code to this version of VNC. Furthermore, FSF France later discovered that Edu4 had removed copyright and license notices in the software. All of these activities violate the terms of the GNU GPL. AFPA filed suit in 2002 to protect its rights and obtain the source code.

There are a couple of important points about this decision. The first is noted in the post quoted above:

"what makes this ruling unique is the fact that the suit was filed by a user of the software, instead of a copyright holder. It's a commonly held belief that only the copyright holder of a work can enforce the license's terms - but that's not true in France. People who received software under the GNU GPL can also request compliance, since the license grants them rights from the authors."

The other point flows from this. The French legal system has many novel aspects, so it's important that the GNU GPL was upheld here, just as it was in Germany. It means that not only is the approach that the GPL takes being upheld by courts, it is being upheld in courts that look at things from different legal perspectives. That augurs well for future rulings in other jurisdictions.

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