Harald Welte (of gpl-violations.org and netfilter fame) won in court against D-Link. Apparently D-Link had already agreed to fulfill the GPL by offering the source code on their FTP server; the lawsuit was about them having to pay the costs of Harald Welte (buying their product, reverse engineering, legal costs).

Don’t emphasize D-Link here much - they did comply with the GPL quickly after being notified of their violation (apparently). They have to pay 3500 Euro for his costs and give him some numbers on sales of the product. It’s not a “bad, bad thieves” result, but basically a “comply with the license right away, or pay for the enforcement”.

Jörg Schilling, the upstream of cdrecord - which has now been replaced by “wodim”, “write optical disc media” - has frequently been claiming that Debians interpretaion of the GPL is incorrect, or even that §2 of the GPL doesn’t hold. And he claims that this judgement still didn’t verify the GPL. (Just as everybody expected, he trolled in the heise newsticker article on this). Seems he’s really trying to make a bad impression with everybody.

To me, the judge did do some pretty clear statements: he said that §2 is an integral part of the license, so while you might be able to debate its validity, it will render the whole license invalid, so you’re then infringing on the authors copyright. If you want to use it, you have to obey the full license as is, or obtain a different license. There is no “the license is broken, so I can use it just as I’d like to”. And by dsitributing it without having obtained a different license, you are accepting the license as is.