One of the principles on which the concept of free software and the movement that arose from it was that of GPL licensing. Acronym for General Public License, GPL it’s a license which establishes the terms and conditions for the distribution and use of a program. It is designed to ensure that software always remains free, allowing users to run, study, modify and distribute it freely.
What is a GPL license
Speaking about 50 years of GNU and free software, we have already had the opportunity to highlight that there are different versions of the GPL license but they all share some fundamental and essential aspects. First of all, there is the freedom of use: Users are free to run the program and use it for any purpose. Freedom of study is also provided, with access to the application source; there freedom of modification and distribution.
The GPL license is based on the concept of copyleft: modified versions of the original software and any derivatives thereof (so-called fork) must also be distributed under the same license.
Create da Richard Stallman and from Free Software Foundation (FSF), the most common versions of the license include GPL version 2 (GPL-2.0) and GPL version 3 (GPL-3.0). Both share the foundation but version 3 was introduced to meet new challenges and adapt to technological changes.
A GPL license can also be modified to create derivative licenses, but it is important to comply with the requirements of the original GPL. The GNU Affero GPL (AGPL) was created for example as a separate “ad hoc” license for specific needs. Similar to the GNU GPL, AGPL requires that the source code be made available even when the software is running on a network server and not just distributed.
France orders a telecommunications operator to pay 650,000 euros for violating a GPL license
The legal matter, which has dragged on for many years, had reached its conclusion in mid-February 2024 but only today did the details on the judges’ decision come out. The Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Orangea well-known French telecommunications operator, has violated the terms of the GPL license of Lassoa reference library for the protocol Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) developed by Open.
SAML is a cybersecurity standard used to enable authentication and authorization between different domains, particularly when it comes to web-based applications. It is designed to simplify the process of users accessing digital assets without having to maintain multiple credentials for each service (single sign-onSSO).
Does it remind you of anything? The Public Digital Identity System (SPID), widely used in Europe, is itself based on the SAML framework and the European Digital Wallet was developed starting from the same concepts.
In 2005, Orange won a contract with the French Agency for the Development of Digital Administration in order to develop part of the public body’s portal to enable new possibilities for interaction with the Public Administration. Orange used the software Lasso but, according to the judges, it did not share the changes applied nor did it grant the rights to reuse the interventions made by its developers.
How did the story involving the protection of free software end?
Open sued Orange in 2010 and after mixed success, in the courtrooms, for both parties, now the Paris Court of Appeal has established that the French telecommunications operator has actually committed a violation, infringing the license terms.
As stated in the operative part of the sentence, not only did Orange not respect several articles of the GNU GPL license but it also “forgot” to declare the paternity of the Lasso software to the French State, which had commissioned the preparation of the website for the benefit of citizens and taxpayers.
Thus, the judges established that Orange is required to pay Entr’Ouvert the sum of 500,000 euros in compensation for damages and 150,000 euros for moral damages.
The amounts were defined taking into account both the loss of profit suffered by Entr’Ouvert and the profits obtained by Orange. The SAML Lasso library is available under both GPL and commercial licenses.