OStatic

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, LimeWire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

It's actually not just any repository. It is, for many, the repository for open source applications -- Sourceforge.

There are two streams of creativity that come together to create a free or open-source software application. The first, and most obvious to the majority of developers, is the set of bits that make up the source code for the application. But equally important to the political aspirations behind open source is the second stream: the legal craft that goes into making up the license for the software. If, like most developers, you're a bit shaky on this second part, help is as close as the publications of the Software Freedom Law Center.