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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."
...since Palm mentions muPDF in their documentation, and they don't have a commercial license for it. Anyone in the software industry, anyone using libraries they didn't write, should understand that there's a difference between "open source" and "public domain."
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How hard is it to just release a totally OSS version of your OS with all applications and stuff there and let people modify it and put it on your phone? I really don't see the point of trying to complicate things by closing the OSS. Release everything for free and you can take a lot more free code and not having to worry about paying lots of money when you are caught.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yeah the "industry" would love all open source code to be BSD so they can use it with impunity. Honestly let's stop this FUD. It's simply not true. Code under the GPL is no different from code under any other license. If you don't use it in compliance with the license then you are in a copyright violation situation, and the law allows financial remedies for such a case. The fact that it is GPL is irrelevant to this. Also the summary is incorrect. Palm is in a copyright violation now and have three choices: 1. remove the GPL code, 2. license the code under a different arrangement, and 3. License their derivative product as GPL.
Why are you upset when copyright holders exercise their rights under the law to prevent a company from knowingly or unknowingly rip them off? How would BSD help this situation? Because the GPL actually has teeth we're starting to see the tip of the ice berg as far as willful license violations go. It's impossible to judge how much code is being used illegally in proprietary products. We're not talking GPL either. Any license. Microsoft code, code from some other source.
Do liberty and capitalism allow one the right to violate copyrights? The GPL exists to protect the rights and freedoms of the developers and the end users while allowing free redistribution of code. I know of no other license that does this so effectively. In my opinion, if all open source code was BSD, there really would be no open source community or ecosystem. Like Adam Smith said, sometimes you have to balance self-interest with self-interest. The BSD doesn't do that really well. Certainly there is zero incentive for a company to release code under the BSD if it's just going to be used directly against them. The GPL allows companies to foster communities and promote development, while maintaining a level playing field for all the players.
Further to your comment, I pulled down the source code from Palm (http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.1/index.html) and compared it to the the earliest source I could find on Artifex's site. Palm is using an earlier version (02-Mar-2008) of the muPDF source which is licensed under GPLv2. Artifex's available source(01-Jul-2009) is GPLv3.
IIRC GPLv2 allows Palm to distribute the application as they are doing.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Which brings up a question I have had on my mind for quite awhile now since all these companies started getting sued for GPL violations, that nobody has really been able to answer: What is wrong with BSD? Is it broken, code sucks, bloated beyond repair, what?
Because it seems like from a business standpoint, especially after RMS wrote the "TiVo clause" into GPL V3, that the business world would just avoid anything GPL altogether, and stick with BSD code that won't come back to bite them in the ass. After all it worked for Apple and MSFT, so what is wrong with BSD? There has to be SOME reason why these companies keep snatching GPL and dealing with possible lawsuits when you can do whatever you want with BSD and all is golden, so what is it?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you look at the Artifex license page (http://www.artifex.com/indexlicense.htm) you will actually see that they have a very strange interpretation of the GPL. They basically claim that you can't bundle Ghostscript together with non-GPL programs, or install it with the same installer. If they used the same legal advice for writing their licensing terms as they have used for filing the lawsuit, then it might turn up in the end that the whole case has no merit...
You seem to be confused. If we can talk about a copyright law consensus on slashdot, that consensus would be that copyright is there to benefit the authors but it should not be used as a weapon to hinder any social, cultural and educational use of any copyrighted work. That, oddly enough, is the premises where the french copyright tradition is built upon. That is the reason why commercial distribution of an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work is frowned upon (i.e., piracy) but if you can (or at least should) be able to freely access copyrighted works without the need for an authorization of the copyright owner if it's strictly for personal use and your distribution does not have any meaningful and measurable impact on the commercial distribution. It's straight forward and it has been the norm in an awful lot of countries, at least until the US started to force it's version of copyright law onto the world.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.