this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 days ago by dantheclamman@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] francois@jlai.lu 30 points 3 days ago

The GPL is enforceable, as far as the courts in the US are concerned, but the time and expense of doing so means such cases are rare. One such claim against Vizio, filed in 2021 by the Software Freedom Conservancy, is expected to be tried in September 2025.

Hill pointed to a series of posts he made in June 2024 about "sleazy rip-offs in the Chrome Web Store" that simply rewrap "uBlock, uBlock Lite, or other content blockers with their own user interface," and some monetization scheme, often removing the copyright and licensing information

If a pretty large project such as ubo doesn't have the means to enforce the GPL license, I think pretty much all open source projets, that are usually lacking funds, wouldn't be able to enforce their license either

I didn't realize that before, I thought copyleft licences like GPL really offered something but unless the project is backed by a for profit company or has enough funding, permissive licenses like MIT/FreeBSD achieve kind of the same result in practice.. And all the contributions I did on copyleft projects could be (and probably were) stolen to make profits, while the maintainers of the original project struggle to pay for coffees.. I feel a lot less guilty for my media piracy

But I wonder, are there means to enforce this license from outside the US ?