A California judge has tentatively sided with Software Freedom Conservancy in its GPL case over Vizio’s SmartCast TVs, but the final outcome of this week’s hearing is still pending.
We’re waiting to hear the final outcome of a legal case involving the GPL that harkens back to the bad “good ol’ days” of Linux and open source.
This case involves an action brought against Vizio — a maker of relatively low‑cost flat panel TVs — by Software Freedom Conservancy, which claims that the company has been in violation of the General Public License, version 2 and Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 for many years. The case centers around the company’s SmartCast TVs, which employ Linux, BusyBox, and other software licensed under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1, without making source code available.
SFC’s standing in the case is as a purchaser of a Vizio smart TV and not as a copyright holder.
SFC has reported that early Thursday morning Judge Sandy N. Leal of the Superior Court of California issued a tentative ruling supporting SFC’s claim that Vizio has a duty to provide SFC with the complete source code covered under open source licenses to a TV it purchased. Being tentative, the ruling isn’t final– such rulings are issued so that the parties know how the judge is leaning and can tailor their oral arguments — and it was issued before a hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. PST the same day.
So far there’s been no news coming out of that hearing, although we’ve reached out to SFC for a comment.
A Predictable Outcome
These days the GPL and other open source licenses have been court tested enough to make the outcome in a case like this somewhat predictable: the courts will support the terms of the license. This hasn’t always been the case. For many years after the first adoption of the GPL as a free software license, and even later when the term open source came into use, it wasn’t clear whether courts would support the terms of open source licensing.
That began to change in the first decade of the 21st century as cases were brought against violators of open source licenses, with license terms being upheld by the courts.
Then in September 2007 the Software Freedom Law Center filed the first-ever US GPL enforcement lawsuit. The defendant was Monsoon Multimedia, for its Hava place‑shifting devices that SFLC claimed shipped with BusyBox installed without provisions for the source code. That case was dismissed about a month later, after Monsoon agreed to publish source code, appoint a compliance officer, notify customers of their GPL rights, and pay an undisclosed sum.
Later that year, SFLC brought additional BusyBox-related GPL suits against other vendors, including Xterasys and Verizon, over failure to provide source code. Those were also settled with compliance commitments and payments.
Vizio: A Goliath in Disguise
In the case against Vizio, SFC is going against a company that can afford a deep pocket defense if it decides to play hardball. The Irvine, California-based company that was founded in 2002 as a designer of televisions, soundbars, and related software and accessories, was acquired by Walmart for $2.3 billion in a deal that was announced in February 2024 and closed that December.
While the acquisition was in progress, Bloomberg announced that Walmart planned to end sales of Vizio products at Amazon and Best Buy in order to turn the company into a private label brand available only at Walmart and Sam’s Club locations.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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