arstechnica.com — A federal appeals court held Wednesday that copying free software without complying with its license is copyright infringement. The ruling, which will make such licenses much easier to enforce, is a key victory for the free software community.
Aug 14, 2008 View in Crawl 4
meep3dAug 14, 2008
Moved from the post below because it's too early in the morning to use digg's comment system...---Yes, because we all know that closed source commercial licensing* is such a benefit to your company. You should pay _them_ to use the software. Oh wait...* Dongles, phone home, licensing servers, per-machine vs per-instance, multi cpu etc etc
drph0biusAug 14, 2008
Frustrated with the rules?The defendant stripped out anything that would identify the author of the software and then distributed it as if it was their own. That isnt confusion, that is stupidity.Like trogdoor said above, you can pretty much do ANYTHING you want with the software as you use it in house. It is a matter of redistribution, and generally, the only thing that is ever asked in redistribution is to see that credit is given to the author and that the "licensing," which states that you need to leave all of that and the authors info attached if you redistribute the software, is left in tact.f**k. It is FREE software, is it too much to ask that someone give credit to the person who wrote the software?
kwilliamAug 14, 2008
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?
travelsonicAug 14, 2008
Amg,"yo you're saying people don't deserve to earn a living by developing software"No, I am saying you are blind. Where the f**k did you get that idea? Well, logically speaking, yo do have a right to try and make a living making software, but nowhere in common sense can it be said that it will and should always be successful, as that would seem to go against reality, where even the best laid ideas go wrong, or flop in some way or another.Good luck with your other thoughts, free speech pisses you off, but this is America. Live with it.
buckrogers1965Aug 14, 2008
Copyleft agreements over source code have nothing to do with EULA's over compiled programs.
vichAug 15, 2008
Dugg for image included with license conditions in caption....and for the article content.
whispernekiDec 4, 2008
Hmm this is a really interesting story. I've always liked open source and this shows that there's a future for it<a class="user" href="http://www.curemysweatypalms.com">http://www.curemysweatypalms.com</a>