Bruce Perens Explains That 'GPL Is A Contract' Court Case (perens.com)

Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3,872. Bruce Perens writes: There's been a lot of confusion about the recent Artifex v. Hancomcase, in which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract. I'm going to try to explain the whole thing in clear terms for the legal layman.
Two key quotes:

• "What has changed now is that for the purposes of the court, the GPL is both a license, which can be enforced through a claim of copyright infringement, and a contract, which can be enforced through a claim of breach of contract. You can allege both in your court claim in a single case, and fall back on one if you can't prove the other. Thus, the potential to enforce the GPL in court is somewhat stronger than before this finding, and you have a case to cite rather than spending time in court arguing whether the GPL is a contract or not..."
• "Another interesting point in the case is that the court found Artifex's claim of damages to be admissible because of their use of dual-licensing. An economic structure for remuneration of the developer by users who did not wish to comply with the GPL terms, and thus acquired a commercial license, was clearly present."

Comments

I love OSS but GPL is for assholes

[EmperorOfCanada]

Open source is one of the greatest things to have happened in modern civilization. But people who push the GPL is are a bunch of douche-bag assholes. Stallman and his ilk don't do GPL so that their code can be free. But so they can have power over other coders. Often you will see GPL projects that "allow" a corporate license.

It is a nasty game they play. A GPL library will be "Standard" more and more until there really is no alternative. How is this any better than places like Microsoft?

Then the assholes will say, "Well if you don't like it then make your own library." The key here is that most of the people who probably contributed to the project didn't want it GPL but it was the only project in town.

I regularly have my company donate to many open source projects. These donations are pretty good (1-5k each) but we all fully agree that never in a million years would we donate to a GPL project or any over arching project ever.