August 19th, 2004
GPL could get its day in court. Finally.
The Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the Open Source Intiative approved license under which Linux is distributed, and which has served as a significant backdrop to SCO’s various lawsuits, may finally get its day in court. In a motion for partial summary judgment filed Wednesday, IBM has asked the court to rule in favor of its counterclaim alleging SCO has violated the terms of the GPL.
In a world where copyright law rules, just the validity of the GPL as a license under which technology can be distributed has yet to be really tested in court. In particular, IBM is claiming that, since SCO has through its lawsuits and public statements effectively renounced the GPL, it shouldn’t be permitted to distribute IBM’s copyrighted code (code that IBM contributed to Linux) in its own versions of Linux. Though some community licenses have a provision that terminates a licensee’s rights should that licensee sue other members of the community on the basis of their usage or distribution of the technology in question, the GPL doesn’t have such a provision. But, in an memorandum that’s associated with IBM’s counterclaim, IBM claims that, by threatening and suing Linux users such as AutoZone, it has triggered the forfeiture of its rights under the GPL since those threats and suits amount to the demand of fees considered excessive under the terms of the GPL and the Lesser GPL (LGPL). Considering that IBM’s counterclaim looks to invoke IBM’s rights under the GPL/LGPL while revoking those of SCO’s, the court’s treatment of the counterclaim could very well end up being a test of open source licensing. The plot thickens.
