OStatic

We've covered the Software Freedom Law Center's GPL enforcement efforts several times in the past. But their efforts on behalf of the free software community extend far beyond trying to right wrongs in court; they also do what they can to prevent the wrongs from happening in the first place. Their latest move in this direction is an online white paper titled A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance.

The news came today from the Software Freedom Law Center that they've filed another suit to enforce the GPL on behalf of the developers of BusyBox. This time the company in the sights is Extreme Networks, manufacturers of various switches and other products. Will we finally get our test of the GPL in a US court?

The GNU General Public License is nearly 20 years old (version 1 came out in 1989). In that time there have been at least 100 million lawsuits filed in the US (and that's a conservative estimate). Amazingly enough, not one of those millions of court cases has actually tested the GPL's validity. How can that be - and is it a problem for the open source software movement?

As reported in Groklaw and on the plaintiff's blog, Skype has decided to withdraw its appeal against a 2007 German court decision that found it was violating the terms of the GPL. What's interesting here is not the scale of Skype's problems (they were shipping mobile devices without including the required source code, or an offer to send it, with the device), but that things played out in court pretty much as the original GPL designers would have liked.