OpenSourceLegal.org

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.

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.

Here’s an interesting blog post on the method that Apache uses to govern its development process.

A set of Linux Kernel Developers has apparently posted a position paper criticizing the proposed GPLv3 draft.

The Free Software foundation has posted a clarification of its positions on the GPLv3 which appears to be directed to this position paper.

Richard Stallman has criticized the OSDL patent project as being insufficiently aggresive because it only seems to address "absurd" patents as opposed to those which lack clear prior art.

Sourceforge links to our very own Andy Updegrove’s comments regarding the other OS, Open Standards.

A brief article containing speculation on some of the ways in which OS business models may shift.

This report indicates that the new version "…will be the first major commercial collaboration client based on the Eclipse open source framework.

ITWire offers an interesting account of the manner in which software developers for Open Source projects have greater bargaining power than do their counterparts in the world of proprietary software.

An interview with Microsoft director of platform technology strategy regarding MS’s participation in OS projects.