According to an article in the New York Times, the European Commission will permit Oracle to acquire Sun, reportedly after Oracle agreed to preserve the viability of MySQL. Oracle had apparently, among other things, agreed to extend MySQL’s existing commercial licenses for up to five years and commit not to pursue intellectual property claims against users of MySQL.
See this article on how Microsoft has apparently inadvertently used open source under GPL as a part of a installation tool used for Windows 7. Microsoft has subsequently re-released the code and posted the source code.
Today’s New York Times discussed the use of patent commons or other open-source-like as a method of spurring innovation in the area of dealing with climate change or other “green” technologies.
See NYTimes article re use of Drupal open source software on www.whitehouse.gov.
ZFS (an advanced file system) was not included in the latest Apple operating system (Snow Leopard). Some speculated it was because although available under open source licenses, Apple requested a “private” license. ZFS is licensed under the CDDL; it is not clear whether that licensing scheme would prevent Apple from using it as it wished.
According to Information Week, Diebold is using GPL software in its voting machines in violation of the license terms.
In what could be a potentially far-reaching case (if not eventually overturned by the Supreme Court), on October 30, 2008, the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued an opinion in In re Bilski which denies patent coverage to an invention implementing a method of hedging risk in the field of commodities trading. It specifically rejects part of the analysis used under the State Street Bank case which was the basis of the modern (i.e. post-1998) boom in software patent filings.
The Bilski case upholds the patent office’s rejection of an invention as patentable; it was not decided in the context of the assertion of a patent against an alleged infringer. However, the basics principles in the case would seem also to be applicable to issued patents.
The full impact of the case needs to be considered — it is not in itself a rejection of the possibility of software having patent protection, but instead a very significant restriction on the kinds of software that can be protected by patents in the United States. Patent protection for software in the EU has (since rejection of legislation on the subject in 2005) been subject to greater limitations than in the United States.
This case has obvious implications for the open source software movement, as the possibility of patent problems with open source software has been a cause of uncertainty in many situations.
According to reports, Thomson Reuters, the owned of the EndNote software product, has sued an open source development project competing with EndNote. The competing product, known as Zotero, is being developed by an open source community hosted at George Mason University. The complaint alleges that the project members reverse engineered the EndNote citation file format in violation of EndNote’s end user license agreement.
This could become an important open source/licensing case. Resolution of the issues raised could result either in stopping open source developments of competitive products or holding “no reverse engineering” clauses unenforceable, either of which would cause a lot of chaos in the software community.
Cases can end up be resolved on other grounds. For example, because the case takes place at a state university, the court might dismiss it on grounds of sovereign immunity — see for example, this article discussing a case in California (Marketing Information Masters v. The Trustees of the California State University) which held that state universities and employees were immune from claims for copyright infringement.
A Dutch engineer has published a manual detailing how to find open source license violations.
Cnet published an article describing projects under Microsoft’s CodePlex, a site Microsoft has set up to host projects it calls open source. The article reviews Microsoft’s different source code licenses and the speculates on the reasons why Microsoft releases code under the Windows-only Microsoft Limited Permissive License or open source Microsoft Public License.
See also “Microsoft taints open source CodePlex well” on theregister.co.uk.
