Court Ruling Clouds Open Source Licensing

JosefAssad writes "In a decision centering around a question of a violation of the Artistic License, a San Francisco court has denied an injunction against Matthew Katzer in the favor of Robert Jacobsen of the JMRI project. Importantly, the decision makes the point that the Artistic License is a contract, an interpretation that the Free Software Foundation has been keen to avoid as a legal stance. The JMRI project has a page up with the legal background and developments."

Comments

Re:Looking at all this legal mumbo-jumbo

[bladesjester]

There's another upside to having it out with knives - people realize that there are actual consequences involved.

Re:Artistic License is janky anyway.

[Chandon Seldon]

It's a matter of perception and how arguments are presented. If the Artistic License is successfully bundled in a category of licenses that include the GNU license in a legal argument, then it's possible this ruling could have an effect.

I don't think that's a terribly large risk. Unlike your average model train hobbyist or even programmer, lawyers and judges have quite a bit of legal training. You might be able to confuse them with technical details, but you're not going to get very far with "I know these two licenses have completely different terms, but they're really the same. These precedents from license A apply - you don't even need to read B.".

In this case, the reason for the ruling that the JRMI guys don't like is the lack of a termination clause in the Artistic license. They claim that this other guy violated the license terms (From Term 1: Copyright notices must be preserved), but even if that is true there still isn't a copyright violation - just a violation of a license term. If this were the GPL, any such violation would mean a license termination and therefore a copyright violation. With the Artistic License, all they get is a license dispute - which apparently doesn't get you immediate drastic court orders.

Re:Use it or lose it...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

First of all, as another posted pointed out, the GPL hasn't been tested in a US court; more generally. it is not a magic bullet that guarantees your software will be Henceforth And Forever Free, and it would be nice if people would stop assuming it is. Second, not everyone wants their software to be "Free" in the way RMS does -- the Artistic License is a nice middle ground between the GPL and the BSD, it's the license under which one of the most popular pieces of software ever written (Perl) is released, and it certainly should be possible for authors to use it without being afraid that an ill-informed court will undercut their rights.