Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL
Tentative ruling signals a potential win for SFC’s copyleft enforcement push
Electronics biz Vizio may be required by a California court to provide source code for its SmartCast TV software, which is allegedly based on open source code licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.
The legal complaint from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) seeks access to the SmartCast source code so that Vizio customers can make changes and improvements to the platform, something that ought to be possible for code distributed under the GPL. On Thursday, California Superior Court Judge Sandy Leal issued a tentative ruling in advance of a hearing, indicating support for part of SFC's legal challenge.
The tentative ruling is not a final decision, but it signals the judge's inclination to grant the SFC's motion for summary adjudication, at least in part.
"The tentative ruling [PDF] grants SFC's motion on the issue that a direct contract was made between SFC and Vizio when SFC's systems administrator, Paul Visscher, requested the source code to a TV that SFC has purchased," the SFC said in a blog post. "This contract obligated Vizio to provide SFC the complete and corresponding source code."
The SFC initially asked Vizio to publish its SmartCast source code back in August 2018, based on its claim that the software relies on various applications and libraries that are licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1, including the Linux kernel, alsa-utils, GNU bash, GNU awk, bluez, BusyBox, and other components.
Vizio responded in 2019 but the code it provided was incomplete, according to the SFC, and didn't fulfill the company's obligations.
After two more years of negotiation, the SFC sued Vizio in October 2021, a relatively uncommon event in the FOSS world due to the cost and difficulty of enforcing open source licenses. SFC director of compliance Denver Gingerich told The Register that software developer Sebastian Steck's open source licensing victory in Germany against AVM in January appears to be the first time the LGPL has been successfully litigated.
Karen Sandler, executive director of the SFC, told The Register in an email that the hearing went well, though Vizio's legal counsel "stridently disagreed" with the legal analysis in the tentative ruling.
"Judge Leal said she would take the matter 'under submission' which means she will think about it further," Sandler said. "After the Court went off the record, Leal's clerk specifically verified the Court reporter could provide an expedited transcript, so Leal will likely review the hearing transcript soon."
Sandler expects Leal will examine the filings again before issuing her opinion, which is likely to be issued in the next few weeks.
Bradley Kühn, policy fellow at the SFC, posted about the hearing (in a personal capacity) in a Mastodon thread. His account expresses some skepticism about the validity of Vizio's legal arguments.
"Vizio is effectively saying if you're in a #GPL lawsuit, you lose your right to even ask for source at all!!!" he observed.
Vizio did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®