News about legal issues involving Linux, Open Source and Free Software

 Open source advocates hail appeals court ruling, Aug 18, 2008

Free software advocates are praising a federal appeals ruling on that allows greater protection for open-source software against copyright infringement.

Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed yet another copyright infringement lawsuit on behalf of the developers of the Linux-based BusyBox utility suite. This time the lawsuit claims that networking vendor Extreme Networks violated redistribution stipulations of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed two more copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of the developers of the Linux-based BusyBox utility suite.

Computer engineer Hans Reiser, known for developing the ReiserFS file system, will be sentenced in July for the killing of his wife, Nina, whose body has not been found since her disappearance.

The jury deliberating the Hans Reiser murder trial left the courthouse here about 3:15 p.m. Pacific time Thursday, its second full day of deliberations.

The most undisputed assertion in the trial of Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer accused of killing his estranged wife, is that he's a geek to the nth degree. He's been called strange, socially inept, devoid of emotion, and paranoid...and no one disagrees.

The Software Freedom Law Center filed suit against Verizon Communications in a bid to uphold the terms of the General Public License. A month later, Mark Tolliver, CEO of Palamida, said Verizon's ongoing silence is the wrong response.

Xterasys settles a suit filed by the Software Freedom Law Center regarding GPL violations involving the BusyBox tool set.

Open-source software is very attractive for companies looking to expand their services or quickly get new offerings to market, in part because it's free. Unfortunately, some companies tend to overlook the software license commonly attached to open-source software, the GPL. Verizon is the latest company to do so, and its use of an OSS package in a wireless router has led to a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Software Freedom Law Center.

The GPL is the most widely used open source license on Earth, yet it has never been tested in a U.S. courtroom.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) said it has filed suit against two companies for allegedly violating the General Public License, which covers usage of Linux and thousands of other free and open source products.

The prosecutor in the Hans Reiser murder trial concluded nearly three days of opening statements, urging jurors Thursday to convict the star Linux engineer on trial here for allegedly killing his wife.

On Oct. 30, the Software Freedom Law Center, acting on behalf of the two principal BusyBox developers, and Monsoon Multimedia jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit, which had been filed by the SFLC.

Dimdim calls itself the world's first free Web meeting service based on an open source platform. Users can share their desktops and files while chatting and videoconferencing with meeting participants. Dimdim was originally licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), but the possibility of a big deal with a university made Dimdim executives eventually change to the GNU General Public License (GPL) instead. By changing the software's license from the MPL to the GPL, "we are making it easier for the community to use our product," says Dimdim founder DD Ganguly.

Linux vendors and developers didn't get to relax for long after an August court ruling had the effect of ending SCO's copyright lawsuit against IBM and Novell over their distributions of Linux

The nation's first Linux patent suit currently facing Red Hat and Novell isn't about open source at all. Or so the plaintiff says.

Linux distributors were sued for the first time last week over their operating systems. But despite recent rhetoric, Microsoft wasn't the plaintiff. Instead, the suit against Red Hat and Linux came from a subsidiary of Acacia Research, a company that calls itself the "leader in patent licensing."

The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents.

The first U.S. GPL-related lawsuit appears to be headed for a quick out-of-court settlement. Monsoon Multimedia admitted today that it had violated the GPLv2, and said it will release its modified BusyBox code in full compliance with the license.

For the first time in the U.S., a company and software vendor, Monsoon Multimedia, is being taken to court for a GPL violation. Previously, alleged GPL violations have all been settled by letters from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or other open-source organizations, pointing out the violation.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes said criticism by a top U.S. Justice Department official of an EU court decision against Microsoft was "totally unacceptable."

Today’s decision by the European Court of First Instance upholding previous fines and penalties against Microsoft is neither surprising nor newsworthy.

The Linux Foundation has announced that they will be hosting two summits. The two meetings will focus on Linux, and what part it plays in modern business environments in a legal role.

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward.

A court has ordered a pirate, and Linux user, to dump his favourite open sauce software and install Microsoft Windows instead.

The Linux Foundation Wednesday revealed that two attorneys well-known in the open-source community will make up the legal team for the group, which is aimed at protecting the interests of Linux in the community.

In response to inquiries regarding a German court's ruling that Skype had breached the GPL, the company told LinuxDevices.com today that it "has not acted improperly." The alleged violation was associated with the method by which Skype "distributed" GPL-licensed source code with a Linux-powered VoIP handset.

A German court has ruled that Skype violated the General Public License version 2 by selling a Linux-based phone without access to the source code.

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didn't matter.

There's been a lot of legal saber rattling in and about the Linux world in recent weeks, including dire warnings from Microsoft's lawyers that open-source software violates patents held by the software giant and fears that the Free Software Foundation might punish Novell for its controversial patent deal with Microsoft. But so far the response from the solution provider community has been more of a collective shrug.

The final draft of GPLv3 states that companies that distribute open-source software cannot at the same time pursue patent claims against users of that software.

In case you were wondering--and I was, given the noises Microsoft has been making lately about the open-source operating system--Linus Torvalds does indeed own the trademark on Linux. Interestingly, so does Rosch, a detergent company based in Switzerland.

So the real question is this: is this in fact a patent cross license on specific patents after all? If it is, are we looking at a GPLv2 violation on its face?

The Linux Foundation is prepared to defend any Linux user charged with violating Microsoft's patents, but Executive Director Jim Zemlin adds that a critical review of Windows code would show that it can be claimed to violate other vendors' patents as well.

A former lover of the missing wife of Linux programmer and accused spouse killer Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case, prosecutors informed the defense last week.

Holy crap, I think they did. Here's the patent for UAC:

Linux by comparison has never been found guilty of any patent infringements "making Linux a patent-tax-free alternative to Windows".

The new GPL draft's digital ink hadn't had time to dry before everyone began voicing their opinion on it. Some observers hate it, while others think this version represents a significant step forward in making the GPLv3 palatable both to the Linux community and big business.

The American Dental Association announced Friday that they are suing both the Free Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation over the use of the acronym FLOSS.

While the U.S. courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany.

A U.S. federal jury found that Microsoft Corp. infringed audio patents held by Alcatel-Lucent and should pay $1.52 billion in damages, the No. 1 software maker said on Thursday.

Linux is the clear winner out of a dispute between the Russian legal authorities and schools over who should carry the can over the use of pirated Windows software, The Inquirer magazine reports.

Free software doesn't come without a price, as BT recently discovered.

Cisco plans to resolve a single license compliance issue regarding the use of Linux in one of its iPhones, the company wrote in a blog posting, but a researcher contends that Cisco has more work to do.

If you thought Novell partnering up with Microsoft was shocking news, then you probably don't want to read the rest of this story. Just remember, we warned you.

This is part two in a three-part series of articles debunking some common myths about the GPL's reach and highlighting the sensible solution that the Linux community has constructed despite these myths.

The open source community's commercial and non-commercial members have debated the intellectual property issues surrounding the GPL and Linux for years, and even more now as the release of GPLv3 approaches.

Having formed last year to provide Linux with intellectual property (IP) protection, the Open Invention Network has declared itself ready to respond to Microsoft Corp's 'baseless' claims that Linux contains its IP.

Could Microsoft products be in violation of some of the patents that cover Linux and open-source technologies, as many in the community believe?

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