Bruce Perens on the recent JMRI/GPL ruling:
"For a decade there'd been questions: Are Open Source licenses enforceable at all? Are their terms, calling for a patent detente or disclosure of source code, legal? Are they contracts, which require agreement by all parties to be valid, or licenses, which are binding even if you don't agree to then? What legal penalties can a Free Software developer employ: only token damages, or much more? The court's ruling makes the answers to these clear. Did such weighty questions come up in cases involving IBM, Sun, HP, or Red Hat? No, this is the quirky world of Free Software: it was a court case about model trains."