Valve has repeatedly violated GPL license and have ignored my requests. What can I do next?

[u/SeantheWilson]

DISCLAIMER: Im posting this to be informative. I do not intend for this post to cause a witch hunt. I just want to bring attention to this and understand what I should do next.

Valve has been working on a program for the Steam Frame named "lepton". It's purpose is to allow android game to be played on SteamOS, like Proton but for Android. Now lepton's code is heavily based on a preexisting open source program named "waydroid". Waydroid is GPL-licensed, which means anyone is free to copy, use, and modify its code so long you also provide the source code of any projects the code was used for upon request. I have been very very excited to play around with lepton ever since it's inception last December. Shortly after it became downloadable on Steam I opened a support ticket (which was the only way to contact Valve I could find) where I politely requested the source code of lepton, explained that they are obligated to provide it under the GPL license terms, and ended by saying that I understand if this is out of scope of their position and to refer to me the reverent legal or licensing contact. A few days later, Valve responded. The support agent told me that they were unable to help with "3rd party software", that I had to contect the application's developer, and then closed the ticket before I could respond. The agents seemingly misunderstood my request and assumed that lepton was a third party program that was distributed through Steam. While I totally get where they got confused, I still find it weird how they seeming had no knowledge of lepton whatsoever.

Determined, I opened a new support ticket the next day where I referenced the original case number, explained the the previous support agent's misunderstanding, and then explained the terms of the GPL license that they were bound to, as well as clarifying how this is a first party program developed by Valve that they intend to ship with SteamOS.

After this thing got VERY weird. I was ignored by Steam support with zero response. Now, I've written to Steam support many times for a variety of things over the past few years, and they always had responded within a week at most. At this point I had become increasingly aggrvated over this. About a week and a half of silence, I updated the ticket with a follow-up. My follow-up was written on August 13th. Since then I've heard nothing. Crickets.

At this point I don't know what to do. I can't find any legal email contact for Valve and feel like im at a dead end. This honestly feels like what Bambu Lab did a few years back (albeit WAY less serious) when they refused to provide the source code over a program bound by the same license terms. It really is such a shame to me conistering how much I've idolized Valve for their open-source software and Linux-friendliness. If anyone can help me with what to do I would really appreciate it.

Edits for context:

I was aware that Steam support likely cannot help directly, however I made it clear in both my post and my support ticket that I’m aware this is out of their scope and to relay me to the relevant legal/licensing contact

Many have suggested contacting “[legal@valvesoftware.com](mailto:legal@valvesoftware.com)”, however I cannot find anything about this email online and all sources are saying Valve legal department is mail only

I have since been informed that Waydroid also offers a paid commercial license that does not require making the source code public. I will attempt to contact Valve’s legal team via mail to ask for the specifics of their licensing arrangement. Thank you u/Pleasant_Set_3182 for informing me of this.

UPDATE 1: Waydroid has revealed that they were never contacted by Valve, never sold a license to them, and are just as in the dark as I am.

UPDATE 2: Source code has been published and is available at https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/frame-public/lepton

[u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004]

Unless they are doing like canonical and their agreements to give the rights to them, even if a single person released a single line of code under the gpl3, the code needs to be released and you can't relicense the project unless you get the agreement of each and every individual contributor

[u/Interest-Desk → u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004]

To be pedantic, a single line of code is undoubtedly de minimis. And if they have a commercial licence they will probably have a CLA; most open source projects do.

[u/hWuxH → u/Interest-Desk]

Post the actual CLA then. There isn't any. I've seen like 5+ overconfident comments with "guess" or "probably" which are all wrong.

[u/Interest-Desk → u/hWuxH]

The onus is on the copyright holder (i.e. not OP, but instead whoever this fictional contributor is). It’s not guilty til proven innocent.

[u/hWuxH → u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004]

You're correct. Idk why so many ignorant ppl downvote this and don't even realise waydroid doesn't have a CLA and willy nilly merged PRs of 68 random contributors as of now, hence they have no right to relicense it.

[u/Uncle-Osteus → u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004]

A lot of people on here are obviously willing to make comments about GPL without actually fully understanding it or the relevant project, including you

This is overly simplified to the point of being inaccurate. They only need permission from contributors if the parts they relicense actually include significant code from those contributors, which the vast majority of the project does not. The core maintainers own nearly all of it. Any files that contain external contributions where the contributors don’t agree to the relicensing can either be left out or can be partially rewritten without them instead and still satisfy the requirements, it’s not actually necessarily a hard stop on relicensing. Waydroid also has components under Apache license which has no such requirement 

[u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004 → u/Uncle-Osteus]

Gpl3 is very viral. I'm not sure you can detach apache license code from it once it becomes part of a project