OStatic

The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Bilski vs. Kappos on Monday, November 9th. Not surprisingly, many open source advocates are on the edge of their seats because it's an opportunity for the Supreme Court to decide that software is not patentable. Confused about the details? As part of its mission to advance Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) through law-related services, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has provided a backgrounder with information on briefs filed by parties of interest to the FLOSS community.

In December, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed suit against Cisco, after several years of urging the company to comply with the licensing terms used on its Linksys routers. Several Linksys routers used firmware licensed under the GPL/LGPL, but Cisco failed to make the source code available per the terms of the licenses.

It's not terribly easy to make the FSF resort to legal action, but after five years of relative unresponsiveness, FSF licensing compliance engineer Brett Smith said the organization had to take stronger measures to get the problem resolved.

The case against Cisco has been settled, with Cisco agreeing to appoint a Free Software Director who will ensure Linksys complies with the terms of the free licenses it uses, and report back to the FSF on its progress.

In November, openSUSE implemented some significant changes to its licensing model, with the aim of making the distribution easier to remaster, re-work, and redistribute. At that time, openSUSE community manager, Joe Zonker Brockmeier, said that work was also underway to clarify openSUSE's trademark guidelines.

This week, the openSUSE Project released the newly re-examined trademark guidelines. The guidelines, available in PDF format, are designed to complement the new, easier to customize and redistribute openSUSE releases by explaining how to handle branding in different situations.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.