Slashdot Mirror
EFF Defends Bruce Perens In Appeal of Open Source Security/Spengler Ruling (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed an answering brief in defense of Bruce Perens in the merits appeal of the Open Source Security Inc./Bradley Spengler v. Bruce Perens lawsuit," reads his latest submission -- with more details at Perens.com:
Last year, Open Source Security and its CEO, Bradley Spengler, brought suit against me for defamation and related torts regarding this blog post and this Slashdot discussion. After the lower court ruled against them, I asked for my defense costs and was awarded about $260K for them by the court.
The plaintiffs brought two appeals, one on the merits of the lower court's ruling and one on the fees charged to them for my defense... The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the merits appeal, pro-bono (for free, for the public good), with the pro-bono assistance of my attorneys at O'Melveny who handled the lower court case...
You can follow the court proceedings here
"Sorry I can't comment further on the case," Perens writes in a comment on Slashdot, adding "it's well-known legal hygiene that you don't do that." But he's willing to talk about other things.
"Valerie and I are doing well. I am doing a lot of travel for the Open Source Initiative as their Standards Chair, speaking with different standards groups and governments about standards in patents and making them compatible with Open Source."
The plaintiffs brought two appeals, one on the merits of the lower court's ruling and one on the fees charged to them for my defense... The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on the merits appeal, pro-bono (for free, for the public good), with the pro-bono assistance of my attorneys at O'Melveny who handled the lower court case...
You can follow the court proceedings here
"Sorry I can't comment further on the case," Perens writes in a comment on Slashdot, adding "it's well-known legal hygiene that you don't do that." But he's willing to talk about other things.
"Valerie and I are doing well. I am doing a lot of travel for the Open Source Initiative as their Standards Chair, speaking with different standards groups and governments about standards in patents and making them compatible with Open Source."
Keep up the good fight. People like the Grsecurity folks are the scourge of the industry in my opinion.
Giving up mod privs for this thread by posting in it and IT'S WORTH IT!
Bruce, I've been an FOSS advocate in every company I've worked in, for, managed, ran, owned, started, and directed.
YOU are the champion of living the word.
Thank you!
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ
FAA CPL-H
The entire proceeding reads like a personal grudge unsupported by facts and yet executed in the public court system. That would be the very textbook definition of frivolous.
I suspect it's because that they couldn't win on any copyright claim as Perens (as is anyone) can voice an opinion about copyright just like you just did above. If someone sued you for what you just wrote, that's the equivalent of what happened. Is Perens right about it? That was never the point. It was about trying to silence him.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You're stating the obvious. I mean, Perens can obviously bloviate as much as he wants to on things he doesn't know anything about; god knows he's been doing that a lot throughout his career.
Now answer me this: if this is a GPL violation, why don't the Linux kernel developers actually sue?