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Do you think is there going to be some lawsuits to Twitch for their GPL violations? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Or do you think they're going to liberate some parts of its code?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of GPL is that the requirements are only triggered if you distribute your software

Twitch's back-end code (server code) is never distributed to customers/users, so it ought to be completely fine to use GPL code in any way they want

Twitch's front-end code (desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps, etc) would count as distribution, so any use of GPL code here would have to comply with the license

If an open-source developer wants to protect their code from the back-end code loophole (increasingly important as software-as-a-service becomes the dominant software use case) then the Aferro GPL (a.k.a AGPL) is probably what you're after, as those requirements count network connectivity as distribution