A big legal victory for open source
- Date: February 21st, 2010
- Author: Jack Wallen
- Category: General
- Tags: Software, GPL, Victory, Open Source, Tools & Techniques, Management, Jack Wallen
Many of you may not realize it, but a large victory for open source software was won February 19, 2010. The case, at first blush, seemed very simple. A software developer (and member of the Java Model Railroad Interface Project), Robert Jacobson, had created a piece of software released under the GPL that the defendant (Matthew Katzer - owner of a proprietary model train controlling software KAMIND) ripped off. Not only did the defendant rip off the code, he removed all mention of authorship for the original code and stripped away the copyright notice. Of course the removal of the copyright was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act…so legal precedent was present.
The original patent claim Katzer made against Jacobson was in 2004. The case dragged on quite some time (for all the details you can visit the Wikipedia entry for Jacobson v. Katzer). And although this was a big win for Jacboson, the long-term effects for F/OSS could be bigger. Why? Precedent.
Our court system runs on precedent. A precedent is a prior legal case that a court uses as a reference when deciding on a current case. One of the biggest issues facing open source software was that there was no precedent to fall back on. Now there is. Now the open source licensing model stands up in a court of law and is legally entitled to copyright protection.
Read more...http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=1294&tag=nl.e101
Don
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