intellectual property rights

While at a small IT trade show I was surprised to come across an open source CMS: squiz.net. Under the slogan "Open Source. Own It. Squiz.net" They were very big on open source, one of their case studies saying:

...the use of open source software means that 100% of the resulting system is owned by [the client] including the valuable intellectual property that's been build whilst creating it—such as documentation, processes and the resulting web site code itself

All excellent sounding stuff. Unfortunately, further investigation of their licence shows that:

2.1 You agree that Squiz.Net controls all intellectual property rights (including copyright) in every aspect of the Software, including source code and related documentation.

Which hardly gels with the client owning 100% of the "web site code." Even worse:

2.8 You must Notify Squiz.Net within 30 days of making any Modifications even if You do not intend to distribute those Modifications. Notify is defined in Clause 4.2 below. If Your Modifications are incomplete, You must still Notify Squiz of the status of your progress not less frequently than once every 30 days. If You do not Notify Squiz.Net of Modifications You have made (complete or not) within 30 days, Squiz.Net may deem that you have opted to limit your obligations in accordance with Clause 3 and as such Squiz.Net may reasonably charge You the consideration indicated in Clause 3.

This clause is in conflict with Clause 3 of the open source definition which says:

There's been a swathe of coverage of this, but the best I've seen is at Groklaw: Novell Sells Out.

Seriously though, I can understand why they have sold out. For a small tech company with stagnant growth, Microsoft's money and resources must have a black hole-like attraction, because these companies have legal obligations to give their share holders value for money.

cheers, stuart

EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins has released a statement to the association’s membership concerning the recent course management system patent issue in higher education.

It looks like there's a GPL dispute heading to court in Israel. It's between Jin (the original authors) and IChessU (who redistribute it). The case appears to rest on notions of separation between programs, which has long been a grey area with respect to the GPL, because there are complex technical issues involved and the GPL appears to rely on common sense.

At this point I need to explain a bit about the IChessU client, to clarify what I mean by "partial source code". IChessU aim to develop a site which brings chess tutors and students together. An important feature is the ability to see and talk to your tutor and fellow students. This part is an external C++ library Alexander had obtained seperately (I believe another Russian team developed it for him), and is used as a library (via JNI) from the Java code. So, what IChessU have released was everything (which is 95% my code and 5% theirs) except this audio/video over IP library and the few Java classes used to interface with it.

I've then spent a week or so trying to explain Alexander that it does not matter that the A/V library is "a separate library" and that in order to comply with the GPL, he must publish the source code to that too.

ABC is reporting that the MPAA have deployed sniffer dogs trained to detect CDs and DVDs into Stanstead Airport.

For the time being, Lucky and Flo are working at a FedEx shipping center at Stansted Airport where they are sniffing packages that are shipped around the world. Trainers say the dogs have been notifying customs agents of packages with discs in them. The packages have been opened but so far no pirated movies have been found.

"We're encouraged by this. It's a new tool against piracy but we welcome it and hope others will adopt such practices [...]"

Thank goodness London airports aren't swamped with other security concerns an have the time and energy to address this issue.

SCO has long-running litigation against IBM, accusing it of essentially stealing portions of UNIX (which SCO claims to own) and including them in Linux. The case has received a great deal of media attention, particularly in the web-based media and has been billed as a make-or-break case for open source. Even of something catastrophic happens in the case it would be unlike to kill all open source, but it would be a very significant setback for Linux and leave the rest of the open source community under a cloud.

The international open source community, perhaps without a clear understanding of how US litigation works, has been rather worried by the length of time the process has taken and the numerous extensions which have been given to SCO.

Fortunately, it doesn't look like there will be a catastrophe. A new ruling on the claims made by SCO has stuck most of them down because SCO repeatedly refused to be concrete and specific. Judge Brooke Wells is pretty clear on a number of points, and it now appears that some of the earlier perceived leniency towards SCO may have been related to ensuring that everything was watertight and that the respective sizes of the parties was not a determining influence.

The Debian project has just started redistributing Sun's Java implementation after the recent relicensing. As with all Debian software, the software has been repackaged into a standard format for ease of install, upgrade, removal and testing. Previously Debian merely distributed a placeholder and users had to install Java from the Sun website.

Debian remains committed to supporting free runtimes and development environments for Java, such as Kaffe and GCJ, and we look forward to working with Sun as they explore their options for making Java more free, and extending their involvement in the free software community for other portions of Java and other projects.

The open source project Kororaa has been accused of violating the GPL, one of the core open source licences.

The numb of the problem is that some pieces of PC hardware have linux divice drivers released under non-GPL licences, which means that while the drivers can be downloaded form the hadrware manufactures website, they cannot built and linked into a kernel which is then redistributed as a whole.

This is a huge issue for LiveCDs like Kororaa, because they would have to download from the website every time they booted.

Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms.

newsforge.com is reportingthat a pair of companies are in displute over their use of the opensource ArtisticLicence, widely used in the Perl world. It's a clear case ofwhoever drafted the contract for work between the two companies notunderstanding the licence being used.

This does not appear to be a challenge to the licence itself.