FSF - Credit: fsf.org

The FSF has sued Cisco for GPL-noncompliance.  Cisco has distributed binaries of GPL licensed programs, without the source code as well.

Most of these programs are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the rest are under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Both these licenses encourage everyone, including companies like Cisco, to modify the software as they see fit and then share it with others, under certain conditions. One of those conditions says that anyone who redistributes the software must also provide their recipients with the source code to that program. The FSF has documented many instances where Cisco has distributed licensed software but failed to provide its customers with the corresponding source code.

…

“We began working with Cisco in 2003 to help them establish a process for complying with our software licenses, and the initial changes were very promising,” explained Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. “Unfortunately, they never put in the effort that was necessary to finish the process, and now five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance. As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we grant to all users of our software.”

I actually don’t see what the big deal is in not redistributing unmodified code.  Why can’t they just link back to it?  “Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software”…I’m pretty sure they can still download the source code to gcc and modify it if they want to.  I feel like this clause was designed for a world where few people have internet connections.

• FSF

FSFE - Credit: fsfeurope.org

Free Software Foundation Europe’s Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org have just formed a partnership that has released a guide to reporting and fixing license violations.

The best way to solve compliance issues is to prevent them happening in the first place”, says Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator. “We work to support this by educating the community at large. When problems do occur, we want people to be able to share information and resolve them effectively.” Of course, the ideal is for there to be no license violations, but when they happen, it’s good to know how to handle it without making things worse. I notice that they suggest being careful about posting a suspected violation on a public message board. When I took a course in the GPL from the FSF some years back, from the US perspective, they said exactly the same thing. For one thing, most violations are not intentional, so why make it harder to resolve it by branding someone in public? There are better and friendlier ways. So what should you do instead? And if you are a business accused of such a violation, what are some tips to resolving it quickly and effectively? One, I see, on the top of the list is do acknowledge quickly receiving word of the allegation. Read on for the rest of their advice, based on their experience handling such matters.

Sources:

• Groklaw
• FSF EU

Creative - Copyright info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Creative_logo.svg

[Phoronix] reports that Creative Labs has decided to license their binary X-Fi drivers under version 2 of the GNU General Pubic License.

Creative’s X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.

The Creative XFiDrv 1.00 driver supports the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, XtremeGamer, Fatal1ty, Platinum, Elite Pro, and Titanium series. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording, and ALSA mixing. The current limitations for this driver are external I/O modules not being supported. The announcement was made on the Creative Forums and the full source-code is available for download from their support area (it is named XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz).

More and more companies are seeing the light and freeing their drivers.  NVidia is really starting to stick out lately.

• [Phoronix]
• Slashdot

Scary Diebold Machine with Error - Credit: Fred Benenson (CC BY)

Diebold has been sued for using Ghostscript in violation of the GPL.

The suit does not specify how PES is allegedly using Ghostscript, but presumably it’s to create print outs of electronic voting records. In its lawsuit, Artifex calls Ghostscript “the most widely used PDF interpreter not developed byAdobe (NSDQ: ADBE) itself.”

The alleged infringement “has contributed to [Diebold and PES] profits and is adversely affecting the potential market for and value of Artifex’s copyrighted works,” according to the court papers.

Artifex is seeking unspecified monetary damages in excess of $150,000 and also wants the court to impound PES equipment that allegedly violates Artifex copyrights.

I love seeing stuff like this.  I wonder if they use Busy Box too?  By the way, Fred…sweet costume.  When I ran into this I couldn’t resist putting it in the post.

• Information Week
• gs-devel
• Slashdot

Doomworld reports that Raven Software, after a decade of pressure from fans, has re-released the source code for Heretic and Hexen under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

Having the code relicensed required a community effort spanning almost a decade. At its height, this included an online petition, an open letter, snail mail campaigns, e-mail, an international action item on GNU.org, insider efforts by Chris Rhinehart of Human Head Studios and Doom’s own John Romero, and other activities carried on individually by countless community members.

This release is of monumental importance, as it will allow GPL Doom source ports to freely integrate support for Heretic and Hexen without requiring the code to be rewritten from scratch or to be emulated through empirical testing. The door is also now open for new ports such as “Chocolate” Heretic and Hexen, and for such ports to be distributed in free software packages.

Both of these games are well over 10 years old. I don’t see the point in keeping the content of the game itself proprietary long after the game stopped being sold. But at least this will allow those with old copies of the game to play it on modern operating systems.

• Doomworld
• SourceForge
• Slashdot

Bungie’s free game (GPL), Aleph One, reaches 0.20.

A new version of Aleph One is available from http://source.bungie.org/get/ and http://marathon.sourceforge.net/.

Highlights include a vastly improved Lua API, TrueType font support, major updates to themes and dialog layouts, enhanced Find Internet Game metaserver functionality, as well as lots of other features and bug fixes.

Read the full release notes here

Does anyone know how the content is licensed?  Looks proprietary.

• Aleph One

HP has freed AdvFS, its 64-bit filesystem, under the GPLv2.

The code contribution coincides, for example, with the current implementation of a Linux-enabled supercomputing grid environment on HP Integrity servers in southern Italy at the Southern Partnership for Advance Computational Infrastructures (SPACI), a previous user of Tru64 AdvFS on Unix.

Also built-in to HP’s Tru64 Unix OS, AdvFS is designed to provide 64-bit performance benefits such as a transaction journaling environment for file recovery in seconds, regardless of the size of the file system, and volume configuration on a single disk partition, an entire disk, or an aggregated volume.

Hopefully this will help free platforms gain ground in the 64-bit realm (as if they weren’t already ahead).

• Beta News
• Slashdot

The University of Bath has created a self-replicating 3D printer which they have GPLed.

RepRap itself stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and works by building up the component in layers of plastic to produce something akin to a Lego brick in terms of robustness. Sure, there are other 3D printers out there but most are hellish expensive. RepRap did not cost tens of thousands of pounds but less than a thousand.

Best of all, it’s open source. The developers say that “following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend…”

I’m not sure if they are just doing this to be funny, but it’s pretty cool.

• Daniweb