Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe

“GPL enforcement is successful in Europe. In several court
decisions and out of court settlements the license conditions of
the GPL have been successfully enforced. In particular, embedded
systems are the main focus of such compliance activities. The
article describes the practice of enforcement activities and the
legal prerequisites under the application of German law.

“A. Rationale for enforcement of the GPL

“At present, the enforcement of the GPL license conditions is
driven by single developers and organizations supporting Free
Software. Most famous is Mr. Harald Welte, former maintainer of the
Netfilter/Iptables project, who is running the enforcement project
gpl-violations.org. Some years ago, Mr. Welte became aware of the
fact that many manufacturers use the Linux kernel in their products
without complying with the GPL conditions, and give the necessary
credit to the Free Software community. His letters to the companies
remained mostly unanswered or negotiations were so protracted that
by the time the source code was eventually published, the relevant
product was no longer available for sale. Therefore, he decided to
take legal action in a more formal way.

“After the first enforcement cases became public, more and more
interested parties informed Mr. Welte about other violations. He
then decided to establish ‘www.gpl-violations.org’ to
provide a platform for enforcement activities and public
documentation of his and others’ efforts to bring commercial
GPL users into GPL compliance.[1] Having access to modified source
codes of technical devices is a strong motivation to participate in
the enforcement of the GPL, and thus many people support
gpl-violations.org.”

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