GPL lawsuit may be settled out of court
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In a statement, Monsoon said that it has always intended to comply with the licensing requirements of BusyBox and expects to do so within the next couple of weeks.
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Blog: GPLv3, for all its sound and fury, has not had much impact on the industry...yet.  Very few projects have adopted it.  Here's why.
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Company could call on patents filed with the European Patent Office to sue U.K. open-source users, but the situation's complicated.
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Between the lines The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.â¦
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In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., a lawsuit has been filed to enforce an open-source license.
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perspective Attorney Eric J. Sinrod explains the ramifications of a recent case on the future of open-source software.
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A class-action lawsuit that alleged Microsoft Corp. overcharged consumers was settled Wednesday for an undisclosed amount.
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The chances of a user being sued for intellectual property (IP) infringement related to software usage are slim, industry observers say. But that may change, as some companies hoard patents for the express purpose of using them to extract money from sellers and users of software.
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Patent infringement found; split decision sends part of case back to lower court.
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If Linus and the other key kernel developers were to back a shift to GPLv3, and if there were reasonable legal air cover from respected Open Source authorities for doing so, it seems unlikely that we'd see a substantive challenge to such a move.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has set March 29 as the date for oral arguments on whether companies providing peer-to-peer file trading software should be held responsible for copyright infringement committed by users of their products. The arguments are part of a long-playing case pitting a cadre of entertainment industry players against distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus file trading software. The p-to-p companies have already won in district court and again last August when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Grokster, Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks, and a site operated by StreamCast called Musiccity.com were not liable for copyright violations by their users. The entertainment companies, led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), decided to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying there are seminal issues at stake. The Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion by the end of July.
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Throws copyrights from the train Analysis A dispute over some open source software used for model railroads resulted in an important decision last week, involving the scope of open source licenses and the remedies available when they are violated.â¦
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InfoWorld - The new GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 is not a fit for Linux because switching would require permission from the kernel&#39;s thousands of de facto owners, a maintainer of the SCSI portion of the kernel said on Thursday. Also, Microsoft released a statement that the company has no GPLv3 obligations.
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Blog: Google wins on appeal in Usenet copyright case.
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The company says it is discussing a settlement with the Justice Department.
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(InfoWorld) - The Free Software Foundation has released the fourth or "last-call" draft of the third version of its GNU general public license, set a date for its official publication, and laid out reasons why the free and open source software community should adopt GPLv3 sooner rather than later. The GPL gives users the right to freely study, copy, modify, reuse, share, and redistribute software. Created by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU free operating system project, the license was last fully revised 16 years ago as GPLv2. Besides releasing the fourth draft of GPLv3 on Thursday, the FSF also published an essay by Stallman extolling the benefits of moving from GPLv2 to GPLv3. The new license deals with issues that have emerged recently, notably the patent-licensing deal around Suse Linux struck between Novell and Microsoft in November. Parts of the Linux operating system including its kernel are licensed under GPLv2. Earlier this month, Microsoft executives created a firestorm of protest in the open source community when they asserted that Linux and other open source softwareÂ infringe on 235 of the software vendor's patents. "Microsoft made a fewÂ mistakes in the Novell-Microsoft deal, andÂ GPLv3 is designed to turn them against Microsoft, extending that limited patent protection to the whole community," Stallman wrote. "In order to take advantage of this, programs need to use GPLv3." Software distributors who make discriminatory patent deals after March 28, 2007, may not pass on to others software covered under GPLv3. Ultimately, the FSF would like to do away with software patents altogether but realizes that is currently impossible, aiming instead with GPLv3 to ensure free software can't be made proprietary through patents, according to Stallman. GPLv3 also deals with what Stallman terms "tivoization" or computers containing software covered by the license that can't be changed as well as DRM, or digital rights management, which the FSF prefers to call "digital restrictions management." "Freedom means _you_ control what your software does, not merely that you can beg or threaten someone else who decides for you," Stallman wrote. "GPLv3 ensures you are free to remove the handcuffs. It doesn't forbid DRM, or any kind of feature. ... Rather, it makes sure that you are just as free to remove nasty features as the distributor of your copy was to add them." The fourth GPLv3 draft draws on feedback the FSF received from the general public and official discussion committees on the previous draft that appeared in March. One of the key changes is around license compatibility between the GPL and open source licenses. In the new draft, GPLv3 is now compatible with version 2.0 of the Apache License. The license also supports BitTorrent and contains language to make it friendlier to an international audience. Previous drafts of GPLv3 were met with a mixed reception in the open source community. In particular, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was highly critical of the first two drafts, butÂ mellower about the third draft. Like other developers, he's previously stated he prefers to stick with GPLv2. "GPL version 2 will remain a valid license, and no disaster will happen if some programs remain under GPLv2 while others advance to GPLv3," Stallman wrote. "These two licenses are incompatible, but that isn't a serious problem." By "incompatible," the FSF means that it sees no legal way to combine code licensed under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3. Such incompatibility is only an issue if developers want to link, merge, or combine code from programs licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3. "There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system," Stallman wrote. The FSF will take comments on the fourth draft for 29 days and plans to officially publish the final GPLv3 license on June 29. The fourth draft of GPLv3 and Stallman's essay are on the FSF's Web site atÂ gplv3.fsf.org.
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Blog: Microsoft wants to declare its independence from one of open source's biggest licenses, the GPL.  Here's why it will fail.