The Software Freedom Conservancy’s lawsuit against TV-maker Vizio begins trial in California, raising questions about open-source licenses and the risks posed by adhering to them.

It was February 1989, and on the fifth floor of 51 Franklin Street in Boston, Richard Stallman, then a 36-year-old programmer and graduate of MIT and Harvard, was writing the first version of the GNU General Public License. Stallman had founded the Free Software Foundation, the first open-source nonprofit, just four years earlier.

Better known as GPL, the license introduced the concept of copyleft, a stipulation that any modification made to GPL code, or any code generated from it, must also be

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