A federal court has ruled that the GPL is an enforceable contract (Quartz)

Quartz looks at recent developments in the Artifex v. Hancom case. Artifex makes Ghostscript, an open-source (GPL) PDF interpreter. Hancom used Ghostscript in its Hancom Office product and did not abide by the license, so Artifex sued Hancom. "The enforceability of open source licenses like the GNU GPL has long been an open legal question. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals held in a 2006 case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, that violations of open source licenses could be treated like copyright claims. But whether they could legally considered breaches of contract had yet to be determined, until the issue came up in Artifex v. Hancom. That happened when Hancom issued a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the company didn’t sign anything, so the license wasn’t a real contract." Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley disagreed with Hancom and said: "These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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