Palm Sued Over Palm Pre GPL Violation

zaxl writes "Palm is being sued by Artifex Software over the PDF viewer in Palm's Pre smartphone, which may violate the GNU GPL. Artifex alleges that Palm has copied Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, and integrated it into the Palm Pre's PDF viewer application without the proper licensing conditions. The entire application must be licensed under the GPL if muPDF is part of the application. It seems more and more cell phones are shipping with open source code, but in a closed manner."

Comments

the FSF?

[nomadic]

Those patent trolls...

Re:Another example of Not Really Free

[bug1]

Oh, the industry is moving to BSD-style licenses? When? What industry?

FATI (Freeloaders And Takers International) made public anouncements that no longer will they stand by and take software that demands they do more than stand by and take software !

FATI have declared they will setup a protest webpage at becomeafati.com where freeloaders and takers from all over the globe can declare their intent to idly stand and waiting for other people to give them what they want when they want it.

LATE NEWS: FATI are demanding somebody else setup their webpage NOW and place it under an anything goes style license.

Old Article Is Old

[Cprossu]

Anyone else notice this? -> Mikael Ricknäs (IDG News Service) 07/12/2009 07:53:00

Re:Well (parent needs a clue)

[TangoMargarine]

"I see your post attempting to be succinct and insightful, and I raise you an unqualified insult"

Re:GPL: Intellectual Theft

[Jesus_666]

Careful!

the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system

ext2 stores data through the specific pattern of its fragmentation. Defragmenting would be like formatting your hard drive. Bad idea.

It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License.

Actually, GPL stands for "General Public License", after the late General Reginald Franklin Public, who inspired Richard Stallman to much of his Free Software ideals when both were working on a then-classified national defense project (a device to automatically hack enemy computers that later was scrapped and reformed into the VAX line of computers).

Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.

The GPL has a "mere aggregation" clause. It states that for any program on any computer aggregate with a computer running GPL software ("aggregated") you have to release the full source code to any program running on it. This is why Microsoft has come up with the "Shared Source" initiative - they accidentally installed the GIMP without reading the license.

We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.

Note that you are now required to acquire and release the source code for Windows 2000 through whichever means neccessary.

I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".

Do note that Shared Source exists to satisfy the GPL's "mere aggregation" clause, which also sttes that the license you release the source code under must be GPL-compliant, which is defined as being "at least as draconic as the GPL". That is why the Shared Source license not only incorporates all of the GPL's restrictions but also prevents any company reading any Shared Source-licensed code file, for use in programming or as a reference or otherwise, from making any profits at all ever again (Shared Source License, art. 19.b.ii.).

Your company is committing felony copyright infringement and should turn itself in now before ACTA is enacted, which will equalize the legal repercussions for software and high-seas piracy, temporarily extraterritorialize the premises of infringers and set a mandatory bounty on the infringers' heads. If you don't want people to storm your premises and shoot you at their leisure, you should act now while the penalty is merely twenty years of prison time and a permanent ban from working with computers ever again for your entire company.