Legal Issues

These Articles are indexed under Legal Issues and sorted by date published.

Linux Driver Copyright Violation

"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…

Forced to Dump Linux for Windows

Scott McCausland (sk0t), the ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker isn’t having much luck lately. Back in September 2006, he pleaded guilty to two charges - ‘conspiracy to…

How Model Train Software Will Have an Important Effect on Open Source Licensing

One of the frustrations of lawyers serving the open source industry is that they have few cases which interpret open source licenses. As Eben Moglen has pointed out, such cases are few because…

Open source license bars claim for copyright infringement

"Plaintiff Jacobsen wrote some decoder definition files and made them available under an open source license used by the Java Model Railroad Interface Project. This open source license granted…

Statement from SCO Regarding Recent Court Ruling

"The company is obviously disappointed with the ruling issued last Friday. However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after…

A Chart of the Summary Judgment Rulings in SCO v Novell

"The court's rulings on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell are in a document that is long and complex, and I'm still reading and analyzing it myself. We've grasped the big…

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights!

I'm not sure how we missed this on friday, but Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most: "The court…

SCO and IBM stipulate to another change in the schedule

Well, this is different. Remember when IBM asked for a 30-day extension in the pretrial schedule deadlines, or alternatively stipulated that after the Novell trial would be fine? They couldn't get…

German court convicts Skype of GPL breach

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.

Skype sells the WSKP100 phone, made by…

What Linspire Agreed To

"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…