Almost all questions and information on both SO and \"Google\" describes how dif

Question

Almost all questions and information on both SO and "Google" describes how different licenses works and what license to choose for your work?

But how do they work in reality.

Almost everyone I have spoken to have vastly different thoughts of how they work, including hard core open source developers that gladly share their libs and consultants who is only interested in money and would never reveal their libs.

First I will give my impression of how they work in practice with three questions / statements and you can agree or disagree with me on those.

Lets say I make a large application and have a small portion of that from GPL code, then the copyright holder can't do much about it as it's deemed non essential code for my application and thereby the "law" rules over the GPL?

If the code is generic the copyright doesn't hold. For example if I make a tutorial on how to set up a chess engine no one have to care about my license. That's because my code is mechanical in nature.

If I use a lot of GPL code that is essential for my application and don't disclose it and someone finds out, my "punishment" will be to release all my source code, large companies are terrified by this.
But for a small hobby developer this isn't much of an issue as the software wouldn't be written at all or would be open sourced from the start anyway? I don't like this approach personally because I find it unethical and disrespectful to the original author.

Explanation / Answer

There is very little or no precedent for what the "law" actually thinks about most open source licenses in most jurisdictions. One thing to note is that breaking an Open Source License is likely to not be considered copyright infringement. It's a breach of contract. The work was not used without permission, permission existed and the terms were violated. Copyright holder vs infringer is very different from licensor vs noncompliant licensee in court. (and very different across jurisdictions)

There is so little precedent I think it would be speculation to say what your "punishment" might be in a case that actually went to trial. Generally for a breach of contract it would be monetary damages. Nobody can say if a particular judge or jury would require the defendant to retroactively comply with the original terms. It would be surprising though.

The 'punishment' would really be the damage to reputation. The cost of the PR effort for a large well known company to recover from the fallout of getting caught "stealing from the community" is the real disincentive in my opinion.

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