A Big Change for Open Source. By Bruce Perens.
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. The man who prompted that decision could be described as the worst enemy a Free Software project could have. This is the story of how our community was able to benefit from that enemy. 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. The reason for so many questions about Open Source licenses was simple: there weren't any court cases about them, so nobody could say with any confidence how a judge would rule. The few cases that did start up never reached a verdict, because the parties settled their dispute and kept the details of their agreement secret. more... http://tinyurl.com/3gw7vx _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
