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posted by on Friday May 19 2017, @09:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-as-in-willy? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Although the first version of the GNU GPL was released by Richard Stallman back in 1989, and version 3 was issued in 2007, there have been surprisingly few court cases examining it and other open source licenses, and whether they are legally watertight.

A key case is Jacobsen v. Katzer from 2008. As a detailed Groklaw post at the time explained, the US appeals court held that open source license conditions are enforceable as a copyright condition. Now we have another important judgment, Artifex v. Hancom, that clarifies further the legal basis of open source licenses. It concerns the well-known Ghostscript interpreter for the PostScript language, written originally by L. Peter Deutsch, and sold by the company he founded, Artifex Software. Artifex was a pioneer in adopting a dual-licensing approach for Ghostscript. That is, you could either use the software under the GNU GPL, or you could avoid copyleft's redistribution requirements by taking out a conventional proprietary license.

Hancom is a South Korean company that produces Hangul, word-processing software that is primarily used in South Korea as an alternative to Microsoft Word. Artifex says that Hancom incorporated Ghostscript into its Hangul software, but neither sought a proprietary license, nor complied with the terms of the GPL by releasing the source code for the application that incorporated Ghostscript. As a result, Artifex took legal action, alleging copyright infringement and breach of contract. Hancom asked the court to dismiss Artifex's complaint on several grounds, but they were all denied. The most significant ruling is on Hancom's claim that the GNU GPL was not a contract. In her order, embedded below, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote:

The GNU GPL, which is attached to the complaint, provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its terms if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Plaintiff alleges that Defendant used Ghostscript, did not obtain a commercial license, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNU GPL. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170515/06040337368/us-court-upholds-enforceability-gnu-gpl-as-both-license-contract.shtml


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @09:31PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @09:31PM (#512390)

    Eben was the one who really wrote the GPL while Dick Bathroom Stall-Man took a shit and yelled through the door, "I'm going to call it Copy-LEFT, get it, get it? Hahahahaha. Hold on a minute. I'm pushing out another patch to emacs. Aw man it's hanging from my ass by a hair. No toilet paper! I'll need to reach back and pull out my latest brilliant piece of handiwork. Hahahahaha! Get it! Handiwork and my hand is coated with my own brown genius!! Send in my pet gnu to lick my anus clean. Eben! Eeebbeeen. You hear me???"

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by DECbot on Friday May 19 2017, @09:56PM (2 children)

    by DECbot (832) on Friday May 19 2017, @09:56PM (#512402) Journal

    Aaaannd this is why I prefer Vim.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @10:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19 2017, @10:50PM (#512423)

      Ja, vim skurer effektivt men riper ikke.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday May 20 2017, @03:31AM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday May 20 2017, @03:31AM (#512514) Journal

      We all know nano/pico is the One True Editor (TM). Vim is a type of cognitohazardous mind virus and Emacs...well, it's interesting as a console-mode OS but maaaaaan does its editor suuuuuuck.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...