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Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source
An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.
Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source
An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.
A Big Change for Open Source
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."
US appeals court confirms that conditions of a liberal FLOSS license are enforceable | Enterprise Insights
US court decides that FLOSS licences are enforceable.
huge and important news: free licenses upheld (Lessig Blog)
'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. '
Open License Upheld in US Court
Professor Lawrence Lessig reports on a ruling that protects “open source licenses.” The opinion was rendered by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (they have the final say on US Intellectual Property disputes). The the provisions outlined by the Artistic License were upheld as legally binding.
The precedent set here should also protect other open licenses (GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, etc). The case is a nice legal affirmation of the values we’ve all been putting into our free and openly licensed works for so long!
A Quick Guide to GPLv3 - Free Software Foundation
# the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
# the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors,
# the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, and
Freedom Now
"Reports From the Legal Side of the Free Software Movement"
Freedom Now
"Reports From the Legal Side of the Free Software Movement"
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