Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Condition (New Media and Technology)

Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Condition (New Media and Technology)

Posted Aug 16, 2008 0:04 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Condition (New Media and Technology) by spot
Parent article: Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Condition (New Media and Technology)

This is really good news for open source licensing,

Is it? The decisions was whether the terms in question are license conditions or contract covenants. Each has its own power.

If they were contract covenants, for example, the GPL author could actually do what the uninformed keep saying they're afraid of: force a publisher who incorporates the code into his object-code product to disclose his source code. (Whereas as license conditions, the most he can get is royalties for the code the publisher copied).

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