Legal Archive

Monsoon Multimedia, which was subjected to the first US lawsuit on non-compliance with the GPL, has published a press release in which they agree to make any modifications public and thereby complying to the requirements stipulated in the GPL license. "Monsoon Multimedia today announced efforts to fully comply with the GPL. Monsoon is in settlement negotiations with BusyBox to resolve the matter and intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. Monsoon will make modified BusyBox source code publicly available on the company web-site in the coming weeks."

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed the first US infringement case to defend the General Public License version 2. The case has been brought against Monsoon Multimedia, a specialist in video viewing and capturing devices, which has offices in Silicon Valley and in New Delhi. SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher told The Register: "This case could have far-reaching implications because it's the first case in the US to enforce copyright in GPL."

"Reyk and I have decided to show something from the private handling of this Atheros copyright violation issue," OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt began in a posting to the OpenBSD -misc mailing list referring to the recent relicensing of OpenBSD's BSD licensed Atheros driver under the GPL. He noted, "it has been like pulling teeth since (most) Linux wireless guys and the SFLC do not wish to admit fault. I think that the Linux wireless guys should really think hard about this problem, how they look, and the legal risks they place upon the future of their source code bodies." He stressed that the theory that BSD code can simply be relicensed to the GPL without making significant changes to the code is false, adding, "in their zeal to get the code under their own license, some of these Linux wireless developers have broken copryright law repeatedly. But to even get to the point where they broke copyright law, they had to bypass a whole series of ethical considerations too."

The Linux Foundation, custodians of the Linux trademark, have announced two summits to deal with legal issues surrounding Linux and open-source software. Attendees will focus on building a legal defense structure for Linux and policies designed to support intellectual property rights within open development.

OpenBSD project creator Theo de Raadt detailed his concerns regarding BSD-licensed code and Dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code being re-licensed under only the GPL (as previously discussed): "Honestly, I was greatly troubled by the situation, because even people like Alan Cox were giving other Linux developers advice to... Break the law. And furthermore, there are even greater potential risks for how the various communities interact." Regarding the concern that the BSD license allows companies to steal code, Theo reflected: "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope - the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out."

"After years of encouragement from the OpenBSD community for others to use Reyk Floeter's free atheros wireless driver, it seems that the Linux world is finally listening. Unfortunately, they seem to think that they can strip the BSD license right out of it." Update: The issue has been fixed, but sadly, lkml.org is down, so I cannot give any links just yet.

"We can read the Linspire-Microsoft patent agreement now, or more precisely Microsoft's 'Covenant to Customers', and I thought it would be worthwhile to give it a close, line-by-line reading. I'll explain it as best I can, but ask your lawyer if it matters to you in a real-world sense. For our purposes here, let's just have fun with the worst deal I've seen yet in this category."

The issue between WINE and Parallels has been solved. "On July 2nd, Parallels sent the modified sources to me (Stefan Dosinger). I looked at them, and they are functionally mostly unmodified, except of some changes to get wined3d to compile on Windows(nameless unions, and similar things). What is yet to be verified is if these are the sources used to build the libs shipped in Parallels Desktop for Mac."

Google lost its recent antitrust battle with Microsoft on Tuesday when a US District Court judge overseeing latter company's antitrust settlement declined to accept Internet search giant's request to extend the US government oversight of Microsoft's antitrust efforts. US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was scheduled to review the report in a hearing on June 26, in her ruling, refused to consider Google's petition to have the agreement extended beyond November, when major parts of it expire.

Internet search leader Google is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft's Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users. In a 49-page document filed April 18 with the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general, Google alleged that the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system impairs the performance of 'desktop search' programs that find data stored on a computer's hard drive. Besides bogging down competing programs, Google alleged Microsoft had made it too complicated to turn off the desktop search feature built into Vista.

The European Union's second highest court is expected to rule on Sept. 17 whether the European Commission was right in 2004 to find that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, sources familiar with the matter said. Sept. 17 is the final working day before the retirement of Court of First Instance President Bo Vesterdorf, who is presiding over the landmark case. The ruling is expected to clarify whether the European Commission can continue to pursue the case, or whether it must pull back and permit Microsoft to continue its business practices.

"Details of a controversial patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell have been revealed in Novell's SEC filings. The text of the agreement is now publicly available, but some parts - including one whole page - have been redacted. Although most of the details surrounding the agreement have already been disclosed, there are a few aspects of the deal that weren't previously known. Of particular interest is the language that describes exceptions to the patent indemnification agreement."

"Jerry Rosenthal, chief executive officer of Open Invention Network, has just issued a statement about the Fortune article, which I take as a warning to any litigious folks out there who might be thinking about litigation against Linux that any such action will have consequences. 'We stand ready to leverage our IP portfolio to maintain the open patent environment OIN has helped create,' the statement concludes." Sun's Schwartz chimes in too.

"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."