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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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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.
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Just got my N900 the other day... and the way this phone integrates with Skype is a thing of beauty. With WiFi + 3G and I have slim to no reason to use any minutes. You are right though.... carriers are afraid of this.. and I can see why... because who's going to pay $70 a month for lackluster internet service... while the whole arbitrary minutes to $ value is a good way to make a lot of money. Thus I had to order my phone from Dell... and T-Mobile gives you the same deals as a contract with no contract if you don't want any phone subsidies. I think all communications companies need to realize they're all going to be ISPs in the future, and the only thing they'll be able to charge for is how much bandwidth they deliver. I also think that T-Mobile starting to realize that... seeing as how they offer a $40 data-only plan... to which I'm considering switching eventually.... after I see how this Skype thing plays out over time...
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.