Followup A couple of hours after I posted the Politech item about the GPL case, another side to the story was reported in Politech. A person from NuSphere calims that the case is not really about the GPL license itself but about the application of the GPL to non-open source program that functions with an open source program as well as trademark issues. Nusphere claims that such reasoning could even make email clients forced to be GLPed if they collect mail from an open source mail transport agent. Then came a Politech item with a report from the Boston court.
The judge in the case seems to be treating GPL as any other type of licensing. Good! She did amuse some spectators when she referred to "Microsoft WordPerfect" and referring to the open source movement as "like a religious movement." (At least it wasn't a "cult of the penguin" reference.<g>) See: http://www.politechbot.com/p-03194.html Previous Politect items about this case and GPL: "Boston judge to hear first test of GNU license used in MySQL" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03188.html "NuSphere replies to Politech post about FSF and Boston lawsuit" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03194.html Background on the difference between the ordinary GPL and the Library GPL (aka Lesser GPL): http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
