A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement.

Free software advocates are praising a federal appeals ruling that allows greater protection for open-source software against copyright infringement.

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the Artistic License really is a copyright license and not a contract.

"...The GNU GPL is not an “open source” license except that the Open Source Initiative organization placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. This is trivial in comparison to writing and maintaining the license.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) alleges that Cisco, famous for making equipment used to route data around the Internet, has infringed on the FSF’s copyright in numerous programs used in their Internet routing equipment marketed under the Linksys brand [...] It’s important to note some differences between how the FSF handles copyright infringement and what the FSF does in their everyday work

"So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge [...] In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses.

Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let's try and make things clearer.

A US federal appeals court overturned a judge’s ruling that granted Novell the copyright of the Unix computer OS yesterday. A panel of three judges of the 10th US circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge in the August 2007 case wrongfully handed the copyright to Novell. As a result the panel has ordered a “remand for trial” to establish ownership.