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Jacobsen made code available for public download under an open source public license, Artistic License 1.0, which Katzer copied into their own commercial software products without recognizing the code's source. Jacobsen argued that the terms of the license defined the scope of the code's potential uses and that use outside these restrictions ...
The Jacobsen case is noteworthy in United States copyright law because Courts clarified the enforceability of licensing agreements on both open-source software and proprietary software. The case established the rule of law that terms and conditions of the Artistic License 1.0 are "enforceable copyright conditions". [3]
The Version 2 of the GNU General Public License [14] of 1991 also says that patents convert free software to proprietary software: "Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program ...
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 ...
The court found the GPL license was an enforceable contract and Hancom was in breach of contract. [91] [92] On 20 July 2021, the developers of the open-source Stockfish chess engine sued ChessBase, a creator of chess software, for violating the GPLv3 license. [93]
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 .
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 Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."