linuxurious's Journal: use of copyright to enforce copyleft

It is perhaps an (seemingly tragic) irony that free software licences such as GNU GPL and the other restrictive open source software licences need to depend on the law to make them work. Granted that Richard Stallman seldom need to invoke the law to invoke the GPL, one question is in such a lawsuit, how does the judge or jury determine whether the defendant did not use any GPL'ed code of the plantiff (most probably Richard Stallman)? Definitely, the (offending) code must be revealed somehow for inspection. The multi-million question is who (or what) shalt perform the inspection? Grep?

Another issue worthy of discussion is whether the state or government agencies should deploy proprietary software whereby the source code is not readily available for inspection for security vulnerabilities and stuff that matter? How can the state of government agencies trust the software vendor "not to working for the other side". This is probably why governments such as China are saying "no" to closed-source software. Apparently, the trend is catching on with more government initatives to consider open source software (and then to make the evident switch). Hmm, I might consider doing a case study on this issue if more and more materials surface.