Since computers, internet, open source as a is still pretty new in the sense of legal proceeding history - there are several legal problems still to rise. Legal issues around FLOSS are not a criminal or civil code that has had over thousands of years to develop. So there is no clear-cut overview about what is strictly prohibited or what is absolutely allowed. Although there have been already many lawsuits, there are probably still many to come and they my estimation is that they will get more and more complicated.
It was fun to find out that there are already insurance companies that cover for the risks that what if some kind of legal problem is found in the piece of software that you use. They bluntly phrase it: they think that the IT geeks who develop open source software are not rich enough to sue them for copyright or patent infringements. Hence the best approach would be to go after rich users who have chosen to use the open source software developed by those geeks. It somehow strikes me how this would be in harmony with good-will of the customer. Should all open source software come with the disclaimer: "We hereby do not take any responsibility if we have violated any patents!" This definitely would leave the door open for any of us who naively has used Linux or Firefox.
What if somebody finds out that few lines of code in the Firefox that I use in my home computer had been stolen from Microsoft? Would I need to set aside some money for a potential claimant? Obviously there are much more wealthier users of OSS applications who would probably be vulnerable against those claims.
These types of questions appear to be still unresolved and would apparently leave possibilities for several high-profile legal cases ...
But lets look at two examples more closely
1) Busybox vs Monsoon
Lawsuit on behalf of Andersen and Landley (developers of Busybox ) against Monsoon Multimedia inc. Busybox is lightweight set of standard utilities and it is an open source software. Based on Busybox code Monsoon Multimedia developed it's own product: Hava. On the webpage of Monsoon there was a note that Hava is based on Busybox, but Monsoon did not publish the source code as required by the GNU General Public License.
Case was taken to the court, but after few days Monsoon reported that settlement negations are taken place. Case ended with settlement: Monsoon published the source code on its Web site and paid unpublished amount of money to Andersen and Landley.
This case demonstrates one side of OSS case - when one of the developers would not stick to the principles of GPL.
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/sep/20/busybox/
http://www.linux.com/articles/120629
http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-GPL-Lawsuit-In-The-USA-66330.shtml
2) Firestar Software vs Red Hat
In June 2006 Firestar sued Red Hat and claimed that JBoss (freshly acquired open source provider what just become a division of Red Hat) claiming that one of their software applications - Hibenate - violated Firestars patent. In this patent a detailed method of interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database has been described and protected. Firestar says that they have not patented only a method but the entire concept of object/ relational mapping.
Despite the fact that there are several news sites that raise this claim. Both company websites are silent on that issue. I also tried to look the further proceedings or final results of this court case, but I failed.
Two possible reasons: I couldn't search properly or the case is not over yet. Anyway: the stock price of Red Hat has definitely suffered a little because of this litigation.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9631006534.html
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/192501606?queryText=red+hat+firestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/07/
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