OpenSourceLegal.org

According to Information Week, Diebold is using GPL software in its voting machines in violation of the license terms.

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.

In a case originating from Northern California (Jacobsen v. Katzer), the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that the Artistic License, a type of open source license, contains enforceable terms. This is a potentially significant case for the open source community as it is one of the first clear holdings by a court that supports the use and enforceability of open source licensing.

According to news reports, the SFLC has filed a couple more GPL-violation suits relating to open source firmware used in many embedded Linux devices.

SCO has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

According to news reports, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation sued Red Hat and Novell on patents related to the Linux user interface. The complaint can be found here.

According to news reports, the Software Freedom Law Center has filed suit against a consumer electronics company for use of GPL code in an embedded system without compliance with the GPL. The complaint can be found here.

According to one analysis of the SCO-IBM hearing earlier in March, evidence presented by SCO adds up to a total of 326 lines of code found exclusively in header files and similar items.

According to the GPL Violations Project, as quoted in an article in Inforworld, Cisco’s iPhone violates the GNU GPL requirements relating to making source code available.