this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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But they can, and do.
Slip a pointless easter egg into the code. Make sure that if you don't know it's there, it can only be found by careful examination. Then sue any company whose code displays the easter egg and didn't follow the terms of the license, and you're set for life.
Only if you can afford better lawyers than they can.
If you have a slam-dunk case, you can usually find a lawyer who's willing to take their pay out of the winnings.
Certain areas of law have provisions for this, others don't. GPL law tends toward the not very lucrative side of things. What are your monetary damages? Well, I was going to make $0, but they broke my terms so now my GPL software is better known but I still make $0 - compute damages please?
Dual licensing is a thing, so it's not 0€$£. Also if they didn't care for the license, it's probably also not crediting you for your work, so your software isn't even better known.
Once you blast the lawsuit into the press your software gets better known. FFmpeg was fairly well known before it got hijacked and stuffed in every set-top video decoder box on the planet, but now it has that reputation as well.