The French court ruling in Entr'ouvert v. Orange (February 2024) awarded over 900,000 euros for GPL violations, establishing that open source licenses are legally enforceable contracts with substantial damages

In February 2024, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Orange (France's largest telecom, with 266 million customers) must pay Entr'ouvert over 900,000 euros (500,000 compensatory, 150,000 moral damages, 150,000 disgorgement of profits) for incorporating the GPL-licensed LASSO single sign-on library into commercial products without releasing source code or obtaining a commercial license. Why it matters: this ruling establishes binding precedent in the EU's largest market that GPL violations carry six-figure financial penalties, so companies that have been casually ignoring copyleft obligations in their products now face quantifiable litigation risk, so legal teams must audit every open source component for license compliance (over 53% of codebases have conflicts per Black Duck 2024 data), so the cost of open source license compliance is shifting from 'nice to have' to 'legal liability,' so companies that built products on GPL-licensed components without compliance infrastructure face retroactive exposure across their entire product portfolio. The structural root cause is that for decades, GPL enforcement was treated as a theoretical risk because lawsuits were rare and damages were minimal, so companies built compliance-ignoring cultures, and now that courts are awarding substantial damages, there is a massive gap between the scale of non-compliance (53%+ of codebases) and the legal and technical infrastructure needed to achieve compliance.