What I Learned from the Libertarians
,----[ Quote
| What I learned from the Libertarians was that the best way to protect oneself
| from a government of the people is to design the rules with the assumption
| that, from time to time, even criminals will be elected to government.
| Abraham Lincoln famously said "You can fool some of the people all of the
| time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the
| people all of the time."
`----
http://opensource.org/node/184
New Open Source Legal Decision: Jacobsen & Katzer and How Model Train Software
Will Have an Important Effect on Open Source Licensing
,----[ Quote ]
| The decision makes two important points: (1) the Artistic License is a
| contract and (2) the failure to include the copyright notices was not
| a "restriction" on the scope of the license.
`----
http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-open-source-legal-decision-jacobsen.html
Related:
Microsoft not so 'open' after all?
,----[ Quote ]
| Head of open-source group says more than half of licenses don't pass muster
|
| [...]
|
| Michael Tiemann, president of the non-profit Open Source Initiative, said
| that provisions in three out of five of Microsoft's shared-source licenses
| that restrict source code to running only on the Windows operating system
| would contravene a fundamental tenet of open-source licenses as laid out by
| the OSI. By those rules, code must be free for anyone to view, use, modify as
| they see fit.
|
| [...]
|
| By his count, the OSI has rejected "two dozen" or so license applications for
| language that restricted the use or redistribution of software and its source
| code, even when the restrictions were written with what Tiemann
| called "moral" intent. For instance, the OSI has rejected license
| applications from Quakers and other pacifists who sought to prevent the use
| of software for weapons such as landmines.
|
| "I am highly sympathetic to that point of view," he said. "But the OSI is not
| in the business of legislating moral use. We allow all use, commercial or
| non-commercial, mortal or medical."
`----
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9028318&intsrc=news_ts_head
Reverse-Halloween: The Marketing Checkbox Strategy
,----[ Quote ]
| Getting Microsoft software licenses OSI-approved and similarly getting
| Microsoft's proprietary document formats approved at ISO are like painting an
| old Chevrolet.
|
| [...]
|
| This may be enough to satisfy the enterprise customer that he is achieving
| something different. Clearly, the substance is no different: it's a lock-in
| in sheep's clothing.
`----
http://fussnotes.typepad.com/plexnex/2007/08/the-marketing-c.html
Merging "Open Source" and "Free Software"
,----[ Quote ]
| Of course, they are not. Other Shared Source licenses may very well be too
| restrictive to be considered Open Source. But, Microsoft may conveniently
| divert the attention from this little detail to the fact that *some* of
| Shared Source licenses are Open Source.
`----
http://www.libervis.com/article/merging_open_source_and_free_software
German Court convicted Skype of violating the GPL
,----[ Quote ]
| German district court Munich has convicted Skype of violating the GPL. One of
| the VoIP telephones sold by Skype run Linux, but the GPL text was not handed
| out together with the phone, although the GPL requires that.
`----
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/german-court-convicted-skype-of-violating-the-gpl/#comment-27057
German GPL defender claims legal victory
,----[ Quote ]
| Open-source programmer Harald Welte said Thursday he won a civil court
| case in Germany centered on the General Public License (GPL). The license
| governs many open-source projects and permits anyone to use software
| covered by it, but requires that companies incorporating GPL software
| make the underlying source code available.
`----
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6113453.html?part=rss&tag=6113453&subj=news
Do Microsoft's EULAs have any real legal basis?
,----[ Quote ]
| "Microsoft has no special exemption from the sale of goods act." Well,
| no, probably not - but it might still be selling you "services"
| instead of "goods". But the real point to remember is that it doesn't
| matter a jot what the "logical" position is, it is what the courts
| decide that matters.
|
| As far as I know, no one has tested Microsoft's EULAs in a UK court
| and, until someone does, Microsoft will just go on assuming that they
| work. And I don't fancy the risk of taking on Microsoft's expensive
| lawyers in court myself...
`----
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/25/microsoft_eula/
|
|
