Slashdot Mirror
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."
Damn good precedent set. Although, the guy who patented the other fellas work and tried to charge him for it should have been clubbed like a baby seal or dunked in a vat of whale spunk.
A decision in favor for those that work for the common good against a single person's greed!
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
But he didn't -lose- anything
Yes he did, he lost his freedom. The other guy tried to derail his project. The grant of an open source license does not mean that that is the only license that you grant. You can have multiple licenses out there.
It's pure theft, this case, pure and simple.
This is my sig.
I'm all for turning the tables on Slashdot vocabulary peeves, but in this case he really did lose something. Lacking this ruling, if he had not paid the license fee he would not be able to use his own code. Thus he would have been deprived of something he once possessed. Just because the case involves intellectual property doesn't mean that it's the same as copyright infringement.
The open source author's assertion of copyright is a form of greed as well.
That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all morning, and that includes finding out that this guy tried to invoice the original author.
You seem to have redefined the word greed. Let me give you a few of the actual definitions:
"excessive or rapacious desire, esp. for wealth or possessions."
"An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth"
"1. excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves
2. reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth (personified as one of the deadly sins)"
Note the bolded words. The whole point of greed is that it is an extreme. Jacobsen is a model train hobbyist. He wrote some software to control model trains and gave it away free. Not only that, he took the copyright that the law gives him for such software and gave up any ability to make money off it by releasing it as GPL. In addition to that, he's not acquiring money. That's like saying that someone pointing and saying "see that free mural? I painted that" is greed. That you could someone reinterpret this as greed is mind boggling. The only reason I wouldn't say you deserve Jacobsen an apology is that he probably never read your comment.
Excellent point. TFA also mentions possible perjury charges for filing what he must have known was a fraudulent patent application, deliberately trying to claim a creation date prior to the date of the work he was ripping off, and utterly failing to mention any of the copious prior art. The US patent system (and indeed almost all patent systems) are in shambles and are a complete joke in terms of fulfilling their social promise. Now that this ruling has given the OSS community (and CC as well) some teeth, maybe the *AAs of the world will think twice about pushing to have those particular legal fangs sharpened, and maybe, just maybe we'll see some patent reform as well.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Your concept of economics is insufficiently broad. Anything that people enjoy or appreciate in any form has real economic value.
What I use is: This software is available under the gpl... other license terms are available for a cost of 1 million dollars. That way, i've got a good damages claim in the case of violations.