[SGVLUG] Open Source wins a notable court case

Joel Witherspoon joel.witherspoon at gmail.com
Sun Oct 5 11:34:52 PDT 2008


This is an article by Bruce Perens regard OS licensing and its validity.

Of note from the article is the Federal Circuit Court appeal ruling:

*The judge's decision was appealed in the Federal Circuit Court. A large
number of Open Source projects and their attorneys, working for free, filed
a "friend of the court" brief. What the appeals court found was,
essentially, that the Free Software license was a license, rather than a
contract, that it does not require that both parties agree before it can be
binding, that its terms can be enforced, that if you violate the license
you're a copyright infringer, and that violation of an Open Source license
causes real economic damage to the copyright holder even though the
copyright holder doesn't charge money for his software.*

Here's the article:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3775446_2
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.sgvlug.net/pipermail/sgvlug/attachments/20081005/e84a7a84/attachment.html 


More information about the SGVLUG mailing list