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Open source license litigation involves lawsuits surrounding open-source licensed software. Many of the legal rights of open source software licensors enforceable against users violating licensing agreements are untested by the U.S. legal system. [ 1 ]
FOSS stands for "Free and Open Source Software". There is no one universally agreed-upon definition of FOSS software and various groups maintain approved lists of licenses. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is one such organization keeping a list of open-source licenses. [1] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a list of what it ...
Free and open-source software licenses have been successfully enforced in civil court since the mid-2000s. [85] In a pair of early lawsuits—Jacobsen v. Katzer in the United States and Welte v. Sitecom in Germany—defendants argued that open-source licenses were invalid. [86] [87] Sitecom and Katzer separately argued that the licenses were ...
The appeals court said, "Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago," and cited as examples "the GNU/Linux operating system, the Perl programming language, the Apache web server programs ...
Leading open-source figures and companies [10] have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them. Bill Gates has said "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today".
Many companies began to claim that they "licensed" but did not sell their products, in order to avoid the transfer of rights to the end-user via the doctrine of first sale (see Step-Saver Data Systems, Inc. v. Wyse Technology). These software license agreements are often labeled as end-user license agreements .
The group Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines and maintains a list of approved open-source licenses. OSI agrees with FSF on all widely used free-software licenses, but differ from FSF's list, as it approves against the Open Source Definition rather than the Free Software Definition. It considers Free Software Permissive license group to be a ...
"Free and open-source software" (FOSS) is an umbrella term for software that is considered free software and/or open-source software. [1] The precise definition of the terms "free software" and "open-source software" applies them to any software distributed under terms that allow users to use, modify, and redistribute said software in any manner they see fit, without requiring that they pay ...