German Court Convicts Skype For Breaching GPL

terber writes "A German court has once again upheld the GPLv2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating the GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone 'SMCWSKP 100' without proper source code access. (Original is in German, link is a Google translation.) Skype later added a flyer to the phones' packaging giving a URL where the sources could be obtained; but the court found this insufficient and in breach of GPL section 3. The plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs gpl-violations.org. The decision is available in German at www.ifross.de (Google translation here)."

Comments

Re:Beginning of the end for open source?

[Billly Gates]

It already is.

I have read here on /. that many employers ban GPL outright even when not bundling it with code. One had to ban ssh even though it wasn't gpl just because it made the banks lawyers nervous.

This is why I support the BSD and MIT licenses. This creates fud for other more free licenses.

But if I were developing software I would be very carefully on what I include or link to in my program. Its not worth losing your job to it.

Yes, RMS some software is always going to be closed because teh MBAs and accountants do not care about freedom but rather profit and they make the decisions to open source something.