Legal issues of FLOSS
In this short article Lauri Laineste describes some legal cases involving FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software). This review is a part of Open Source Management course.
Since free software is often the easiest solution for companies looking for new markets and fast product-development (as it’s free), there are numerour cases where companies tend to misunderstand or overlook the licenses attached to open-source software (usually GPL).
Case study “Verizon”
Verizon, a telecommunication gigant has one of the latest GPL-related lawsuit to handle. The Software Freedom Law Center has sued the company on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, a set of Unix utilities typically used in embedded systems. According to the license the source code should have been added to the box, but for some reasons the company has failed to do it. At first the developers informed the company about the problem but as the company did not respond, they had to sue Verizon. The case is still open.
Actually The Software Freedom Law Center has filed three other lawsuits on behalf of the BusyBox developers (Erik Andersen and Rob Landley) claiming improper use of this device. One was settled, while the other two remain pending.
Source:
Open Source Developers Settle GPL Lawsuit
Verizon hit with GPL copyright lawsuit over router software
Case study “SCO”
On March 6th 2003 The SCO Group (a software company focused on UNIX systems) sued IBM for contributing with no authorizaton SCO’s intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system. And that was a $5 billion lawsuit. SCO wanted revoke IBM’s license to ship its version of Unix and even sent a warning to the biggest companies who might be using Linux, that the operating system might not be reliable. The question was about owning the intellectual property rights: SCO was in opinion that after buying UNIX operating system in 1995 from Novell also received the copyrights and stated that Linux contains features from the UNIX that they had bought and further-developed.
This lawsuit caused outrage in the free software and open source community. They had arguments such as SCO actually doesn’t own the code and they’re not the owners of the UNIX operating system. Besides that it was mentioned the Linux operating system was written form cratch by hundreds of collaborators with a revision history. They also pointed out that Linux might have the same features as the UNIX developed by SCO has, but it doesn’t mean that the code has been copied from SCO UNIX - it could have been done from other open-source operating systems.
The lawsuit ended on August 10th 2007, when the court announced that Novell (and not the SCO Group) is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.
Considerable is the fact that after losing the lawsuit, SCO lost 70% value of its share on the market.
The list of SCO’s other lawsuits.
Source:
SCO vs IBM
SCO sues Big Blue over Unix, Linux
SCO loses long-running UNIX case
SCO Goes Down in Flames: Novell owns Unix