An Open Source Legal Breakthrough

jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: '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 case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."

Comments

profit lost

[Shinatosh]

1, wait for some guy to code something cool
2, In all .c and .h files do a "s/guys name/my name/g"
3, relase as closed source application
4, PROFIT!!

Oh, wait... It does not work anymore?

Well I hope all copying, greedy suckers will learn the lesson!

Cheers

Re:Wow a truly profane injustice defeated.

[halcyon1234]

dunked in a vat of whale spunk.

According to the best research I can find in as much as I dared:

1. A vat can have up to 3000L capacity
2. A whale's average load is about 5 gallons, or ~19L
3. That means about 158 "fun times" to fill the vat.
4. Even though a whale can make waves multiple times per day, let's put a practical limit of 8 times.
5. Thus, you'd need about 20 whales to achieve your vat in a day. (Assume you want fresh whale woohoo. Day old might be okay for the purposes of ickiness, but dunking might become difficult over time as it congeals)
6. Given that you won't want to lose a single drop of the deep ocean geyser to the open waters, this'll be done on land, and manually since whales can't reach otherwise.

That's a lot of Shamu Shucking! Not impossible, mind you, but challenging. You'll need a good team with strong muscles, good aim, and earplugs so they aren't driven mad by the cacophony of "ooOOOo" caused by the whalegasms. You'll also need to ensure that the whales are either sufficiently into this, or you have a good supply of whale porn on hand.

And when you're done, if you haven't found some way to make enough money off this so you'll never have to work again, then you aren't trying hard enough.