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

Re:Well

[myrdred]

If you ARE writing open source software, it's not a bullshit license.

Unless you want to license your open source code as BSD/MIT...

Suppose you're writing an open source app (let's say 20k LOC) and wish to license it under MIT. Now, suppose you need a specific functionality that's already been implemented by another open source project under GPL (let's say the functionality is 1K LOC).

Now, you can either use that functionality, but would be forced to relicense your project as GPL (thereby giving up your freedom of being able to choose how you want to license the code you have written), or re-implement the same functionality yourself and license it as MIT (thereby duplicating effort).

As an open source software developer wishing to license my code liberally, I am forced to either give up my freedom of choosing the license for my code or re-implement functionality (thereby taking away my time from improving other parts of my open source app).

So, the GPL license IS a bullshit license even if you are writing open source software (in certain circumstances).

Re:How hard is it?

[poopdeville]

If you have root access (in a normal kernel/userspace combo), you can make calls to that chip. That makes it illegal to use. Now, the FCC isn't going to come down on your typical iPhone hacker. But if they start messing around with the radio, the FCC will have a reason to. And the hacker will face big fines.