SFC’s lawsuit alleges that Vizio violated GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 by failing to make available the complete source code of the Vizio operating system. The case is currently in the Orange County Superior Court of the State of California. The lawsuit targets Vizio specifically, but the impact could extend to other Linux-based smart TV operating systems, such as LG’s webOS, Samsung’s Tizen, and Roku’s Roku OS.
“We expect all companies that distribute Linux and other software that use right-to-repair agreements like the GPL in their products to comply with these agreements,” Gingerich, SFC’s chief compliance officer, told Ars Denver.
SFC sued Vizio specifically because the group received numerous reports from concerned users about the company’s televisions, Gingerich said. Vizio has shared some of the source code for its operating system, but SFC claims that the code “does not include all files and scripts that would allow the code to be compiled into an executable format,” according to its 2024 amended complaint (PDF).
“As a non-profit charity with limited resources, unfortunately we cannot resolve all violations of the GPL agreement, but we work hard to resolve those that are important to a wide variety of users, and the popularity of Vizio TVs suggested to us that resolving this case would be worth the effort,” Gingerich said.
the terms of GPLv2 say that “(for) an executable work, full source code means all the source code of all the modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus any scripts used to control the compilation and installation of the executable.”
The FSF says there is “no reason” to withhold the code
Vizio and SFC’s legal documents frame the Freedom Software Foundation (FSF) as the authority on the GPLs in question, as it is the license administrator and publisher of the GNU licenses, including GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.
