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EFF Defends Bruce Perens In Appeal of Open Source Security/Spengler Ruling (perens.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the courtroom-drama dept.

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."

11 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Good job Bruce and EFF by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Keep up the good fight. People like the Grsecurity folks are the scourge of the industry in my opinion.

    1. Re: Good job Bruce and EFF by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      We like security, just not the "Gr" part.

    2. Re: Good job Bruce and EFF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, that's the thing, you see. Good security doesn't care about politics. From your perspective you've drawn the battle lines and ejected what you've been told is a threat to open source that won't go quietly. From another, you've been manipulated into removing a better alternative to the terrible security in the kernel as mandated and controlled by a few companies. I'm not saying what grsecurity ended up doing was right, but I am saying they were actively and aggressively forced into that corner, there is no moral high ground here.

  2. Bruce - YOU ROCK by gavron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  3. Another frivolous suit? by macraig · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. not a ruling on the copyright issue itself by ooloorie · · Score: 2

    This was a defamation lawsuit. It didn't settle the issue of whether the copyright issue itself is prohibited.

    Perens' argument on the legal issue itself strikes me as dubious. He's claiming that GPL copyright automatically extends to separately distributed patches that, themselves, do not contain any of the GPL'ed code. I'm not sure why that would be the case, and I'm not convinced that that would be a ruling that would be in the interest of open source software, because it seems to put a lot of other open source software at risk of being considered "derivative works" of proprietary software.

    1. Re: not a ruling on the copyright issue itself by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re: not a ruling on the copyright issue itself by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

      Not the point. Suing him for stating an opinion even it's wrong is like me suing you for what you just posted.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    3. Re: not a ruling on the copyright issue itself by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

      Look at it from their perspective: from what I can see, it was the only remaining avenue open to them to protect their business after Bruce *very* publically broadcast that people stay away from them. This isn't the normal reaction to GPL violations that I can remember. Usually we hear of the softly softly approach, with companies being handled with kid gloves over many years to achieve compliance. A full on publicity stunt with an iron fist - yeah, there were serious politics at play there I think.

      Even if everything you said is right, that means that any restaurant reviewer can be sued for telling their listeners to stay away from a restaurant. Any movie reviewer on YouTube can be sued by telling people to avoid the movie. Also that presumes that any company looking to do business with them was turned away only by Perens' opinion and that they didn't consult with their own experts.

      Let me quality all that by saying trying to EULA their patches at the end was certainly a big mistake. However, I can understand why they had that reaction. Ostracised by the mainstream kernel, they set up shop (without EULA) only to eventually find a project to reincorporate their code into mainstream minus authorship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that reeks of hypocrisy, and is no less a copyright infringement as anything else in this sordid affair. It's certainly soured my view of Linux and the whole "Open Source" movement.

      All of which as nothing to do with Perens being able to express himself. Richard Stallman has some very staunch opinions about how Open Source should be. No one is suing him.

      Personally, I would have taken the lawsuit as a win, as what you basically have is a court saying Bruce was offering his opinion as Joe T Shlubb, not as a professional (correct me if I'm wrong?) I guess by then the damage was done, though.

      You understand that Perens had to spend money to defend himself against a lawsuit that the court dismissed. Also the latest development is that now Perens has to defend against the appeal so he would have had to keep spending money after he won if he was not represent pro bono.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  5. Re: It's hard to be defamed by the truth. by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

    Also they can counter sue for costs which happened in this case.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  6. That's precisely what derived means by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Suppose you write a novel. Perhaps, like Stephen King, you're living in a broken down trailer with no telephone when you're book sells 13,000 copies, netting you $2,500. Then someone turns your book into a movie. The movie doesn't have any pages of the book read aloud in the movie. It doesn't "contain" the book per session, it's a transformation, an adaptation, of the book. The author is entitled to a share of the movie revenue because it's his novel, adapted to the screen. That's a derivative work. "Derived from" doesn't mean "contains".