Villa: Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

Luis Villa writes
about the recent ruling in the Software Freedom Conservancy's
GPL-violation lawsuit against Vizio, wherein the judge refused to agree
that the SFC lacks standing to sue.

In some sense, not much has changed: if you were obligated to
comply with the GPL two weeks ago, you have the same obligations
today. If you didn’t have obligations then, you don’t have them
now.

What has changed is who can enforce those obligations. Two weeks
ago, we mostly believed that enforcement could only come from the
authors of the code. Those folks rarely had time, money, or
interest for litigation, and they might also face a lot of pressure
from their peers and employers to avoid litigation.

If this ruling holds up at the end of the case, the number of
potential enforcers just went way up.