What the Vizio Ruling Means for Open Source and General Public License Compliance

According to an article by Christopher Stevenson and Victoria Lee of DLA Piper, a California Superior Court has provided long-awaited clarity on the scope of obligations under versions 2.0 and 2.1 of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License, collectively referred to as the GPL v2 Licenses. The ruling arose from litigation brought by the Software Freedom Conservancy against Vizio and addresses whether these licenses require manufacturers to enable reinstallation of modified source code on consumer devices. For compliance professionals, the decision offers a clearer baseline for managing General Public License risk.

The dispute began in October 2021, when the Software Freedom Conservancy sued Vizio over alleged failures to provide source code for open-source software used in its SmartCast platform. The plaintiff argued that GPL v2 requirements to provide “complete corresponding source code,” including scripts used for compilation and installation, implied a duty to supply whatever additional information was necessary to reinstall modified software on the same device. Vizio sought summary adjudication on whether such a reinstallation obligation existed.

The court rejected the plaintiff’s interpretation. As Stevenson and Lee explain, the court found the GPL v2 Licenses unambiguous and declined to read in implied terms. It held that the licenses require distributors to provide source code in a way that allows it to be obtained, modified, and used elsewhere, but do not require distributors to ensure that modified code can be reinstalled on the original device or that the device remains fully functional after modification.

For compliance audiences, this ruling applies only to GPL v2–era licenses and US courts; later GPL v3 licenses explicitly impose installation-information requirements, and other jurisdictions may differ. The broader question of whether end users can enforce open-source licenses as third-party beneficiaries remains unresolved, with a trial scheduled for January 12, 2026. Organizations using open-source software should continue to document their use carefully and understand license-specific obligations to manage litigation and compliance risks under the General Public License framework.