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

Wow a truly profane injustice defeated.

[GlobalColding]

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.

Re:Wow a truly profane injustice defeated.

[LrdDimwit]

The tidbit in this article that I found depressing? That nobody has been prosecuted for perjury on a patent application in thirty years. And why did this happen? The patent office axed the department that used to investigate this.

No wonder everything's all screwed up. There isn't even a fox there to guard the henhouse, it's just wide open.

Finally!

[CPNABEND]

A decision in favor for those that work for the common good against a single person's greed!

Re:Finally!

[MightyMartian]

I'd say, from a cursory look, it's also a victory against patent fraud, because that's precisely what this guy did.

Re:Finally!

[Spy der Mann]

Yes I am glad that this guy got busted but lets put this into perspective. This was a little guy fighting a little guy.

And the victory sets a precedent against the big guys.

Re:Open source people are greedy too.

[illegalcortex]

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.

Re:Stole freedom.

[orclevegam]

The GP is right, it's not theft. The ruling sets forth that violating a open source license revokes that license, and that subsequently distributing software using that licensed work is therefore done without a license and is a case of copyright infringement. As such, this guy is committing copyright infringement against the developers of the software he's using. That's not theft, it's copyright infringement, and there is a difference.

Of course, there's also the patent issue coming up here and that's a whole other can of worms. Maybe we'll get really really lucky and this whole thing will somehow invalidate software patents as well, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen.