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God that would be amazing. How incredible would it be if basically all software was free?
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It would be amazing because while unemployed you’d have all the time in the world to play with that software
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The chances american courts would find for this is basically zero. Maybe in other markets....
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... or commercial software vendors would roll back a couple of years in their VCS and start again from that point.
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Sure, but they would still be required to open the source code of the last version they distributed before that roll back, which could then be forked.
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Generally, courts have levied fines for copyright infringement rather than forcing ooen sourcing of code. The times when code has been open sourced are usually settlements to avoid a fine.
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It's hard to convince a court to order specific performance, and this is not the sort of case where it's at all likely to happen.
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I assume the reason was more generally non-permissive licensing and legal issues? Specifically seeing only copyleft as the problem sounds unreasonably sociopathic, so I assume you picked that out as just one prominent example. (That, or I should take care to steer clear of NetBSD.)
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