The Free Software Foundation France (FSF France) is jubilant about a recent court ruling that has affirmed the validity of the open source GNU General Public License (GPL) under French copyright law. This successful GPL enforcement effort will send a strong message about the importance of open source license compliance to the French software industry.

The GPL is a copyleft license that mandates reciprocal disclosure of source code. When a company incorporates code that is licensed under the GPL into their software product, they are obligated to make their own code available under the terms of the GPL, which stipulates that source code must be made available for third parties to study, modify, and redistribute. Companies that ship GPL-based products must provide notice to end users and promise to furnish source code upon request.

Companies that use the GPL but fail to comply with the license's terms are exposing themselves to the risk of copyright infringement litigation. GPL noncompliance is almost always the result of ignorance or honest misunderstanding. In such cases, organizations like the FSF and the Software Freedom Law Center will engage with perpetrators and attempt to educate them about their legal responsibilities so that a nonconfrontational solution can be reached outside of court.

In a handful of rare cases, however, companies have stubbornly attempted to defy licensing obligations and end up being taken to court by developers who are represented by open source advocacy legal groups. This almost never ends well for the companies in question and they typically end up settling out of court when they realize that they can't win. It's very rare for a GPL enforcement case to proceed all the way to an actual ruling. One example from Europe is a 2007 case in which VoIP company Skype was slapped with an injunction for failing to make source code available for a Linux-based VoIP handset.

The recent case in France involved a dispute over the licensing of remote desktop access software. A company called Edu4, which sells distance learning tools and multimedia equipment for education, was distributing a derivative of an open source VNC software client, but declined to provide its source code despite its obligation to do so under the GPL. The company had also stripped out copyright notices and other markers that would have identified the program to users as open source software.

Association pour la formation professionnelle des adultes (AFPA), an education organization that purchases software from Edu4, pursued GPL enforcement with the help of FSF France when Edu4 refused repeated requests to make the source code available. The infringement lawsuit, which was filed by AFPA in 2002, has now come to a close with the Judge deciding against Edu4. The fact that a software recipient, rather than the developer, was successful in a GPL enforcement effort could have implications for how questions of standing are evaluated in future open source licensing disputes in France.

"We've long said the GNU GPL is enforceable, and of course we're pleased to see another court reaffirm that fact," said FSF France president Loic Dachary in a statement. "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 notion of copyright law protecting the rights of content recipients is very compelling and it could significantly lower the barriers for GPL enforcement in France. Equally important is the significance of a successful GPL enforcement effort in another European country. It demonstrates the robustness of the GPL and its capacity to function properly in diverse jurisdictions.

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