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Content Tagged with law + Software

Many distributors prefer to ship only an offer for source with the binary distribution, rather than the complete source package. This option has value when the cost of source distribution is a true per-unit cost. For example, this option might be a good choice for embedded products with permanent storage too small to fit the source, and which are not otherwise shipped with a CD but are shipped with a manual or other printed material.

"The attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright holder that the law will enforce.”

'I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. ... In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license. '

Interesting thesis: licenses don't matter. Programmers like logical systems so they believe in licenses, but in reality social pressures and having lawyers matters more. So you have to worry more about the motivations of people and less about the words of

They are still facing another lawsuit from a patent-holding company for a "user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects".

Article on the 'risks' of GPL especially v3.