Software Freedom Law Center

Last updated
Software Freedom Law Center
Type 501(c)(3)
Location
FieldsSoftware
Key people
Chairman: Eben Moglen
Website softwarefreedom.org

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is an organization that provides pro bono legal representation and related services to not-for-profit developers of free software/open source software. It was launched in February 2005 with Eben Moglen as chairman. Initial funding of US$4 million was pledged by Open Source Development Labs.

Contents

A news article stated:

Moglen expects — in fact, plans for — a large turnover in the staff. After five years, he anticipates 20 to 30 lawyers will have passed through the Center. By the time these alumni move on, Moglen hopes that its members will have the expertise to advise both communities and corporations alike. It will also create a loose association whose members can consult with each other as necessary. [1]

GPL version 3

SFLC represented and advised the Free Software Foundation, one of its principal clients, throughout the process of drafting and public discussion of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) during 2005–2007. Along with FSF president Richard M. Stallman, SFLC director Eben Moglen and then-SFLC counsel Richard Fontana were principal authors of GPLv3, LGPLv3, and the GNU Affero General Public License. [2] [3] [4]

BusyBox litigation

During 2007 and 2008, SFLC filed a series of copyright infringement lawsuits against various defendants, on behalf of Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, the principal developers of BusyBox. These lawsuits claimed violations of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

On September 20, 2007, SFLC filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc. [5] alleging that Monsoon had violated GPLv2 by including BusyBox code in their Monsoon Multimedia HAVA line of products [6] without releasing BusyBox source code. This is believed to be the first U.S. court case in which the complaint concerned a GPL violation. [7] On October 30, 2007, an SFLC press release announced that the lawsuit had been settled with Monsoon agreeing to comply with the GPL and pay a sum of money to the plaintiffs. [8]

On November 20, 2007, SFLC filed a lawsuit against Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas, LLC. [9] On December 17, 2007, SFLC announced a settlement with Xterasys; the company agreed to stop product shipments until it published complete source code for the GPL code and to pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs. [10] The suit against High-Gain Antennas was settled on March 6, 2008, with the company agreeing to comply with GPL and paying an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs. [11]

On December 7, 2007 SFLC filed a lawsuit against Verizon Communications, Inc. [12] alleging that Verizon had violated GPLv2 by distributing BusyBox in the Actiontec MI424WR MoCA wireless routers bundled with the FiOS fiber optic bandwidth service, without providing corresponding source code. A settlement announced on March 17, 2008, included an agreement to comply with the GPL and an undisclosed sum paid to the plaintiffs. [13]

On June 10, 2008, SFLC announced the filing of lawsuits against Bell Microproducts, Inc. and Super Micro Computer, Inc. [14]

On December 14, 2009, SFLC announced the filing of a lawsuit on behalf of its clients, Software Freedom Conservancy and Erik Andersen, against 14 companies, including Best Buy, Samsung, and Westinghouse alleging these companies had violated GPLv2 by distributing BusyBox in some of their products without releasing BusyBox source code. [15] [16] For instance, Samsung released its LN52A650 TV firmware in 2010, [17] [18] [19] which was used later as the base for the community SamyGO project.

By 21 September 2013, all of the defendant companies had agreed on settlement terms with the plaintiffs, except for Westinghouse, against whom default judgment was entered. [20]

Cisco lawsuit

On December 11, 2008, SFLC announced the filing of a lawsuit on behalf of its client, the Free Software Foundation, against Cisco Systems, Inc. [21] This lawsuit was the first suit ever initiated by the Free Software Foundation,. [22] On May 20, 2009, the parties announced a settlement.

Staff

As of May 2020, SFLC's staff included: [23]

Directors

As of May 2020, SFLC's directors were: [23]

Former staff

Clients

Related Research Articles

The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.

<i>SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.</i>

SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eben Moglen</span> American law professor and free software advocate

Eben Moglen is an American legal scholar who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BusyBox</span> Collection of Unix tools

BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with interfaces provided by the Linux kernel. It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux", as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, after controversially deciding not to move to version 3.

The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. In 2005 the Open Source Initiative approved the license. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers it a free software license, but one which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bradley M. Kuhn</span> American free software activist

Bradley M. Kuhn is a free software activist from the United States.

A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.

Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License, but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants".

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem negatively by the burden of increasingly complex license selection, license interaction, and license compatibility considerations.

Monsoon Multimedia was a company that manufactured, developed and sold video streaming and place-shifting devices that allowed consumers to view and control live television on PCs connected to a local (home) network or remotely from a broadband-connected PC or mobile phone. It was one of 5 major transformations initiated by Prabhat Jain, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 5 undergraduate and post graduate engineering degrees from Cal Berkeley and Univ of Vienna, Austria. On the even of Cisco acquiring Monsoon in 2017, EchoStar, the new parent of Sling sued Monsoon for patent infringement, having obtained confidential information about the date of the acquisition by Cisco from a Monsoon employee under murky circumstances. Monsoon settled the lawsuit by agreeing not to sell its products in the USA simply because it did not have the legal funds to fight mighty Echostar's legal maneuvers. EchoStar thus successfully removed its only competitor from the market place. This meant Monsoon's death knell.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Affero General Public License</span> Free software license based on the AGPLv1 and GPLv3

The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the Affero General Public License (non-GNU).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Fontana</span>

Richard Fontana is a lawyer in the United States who is particularly known for his work in the area of open source and free software. Fontana works at Red Hat. Before Red Hat he was counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). In 2012 Fontana began drafting copyleft-next, a modification of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). While at SFLC, Fontana was one of the three principal authors, along with Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, of the GPLv3, the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 (LGPLv3), and the GNU Affero General Public License. He is currently a member-elected director of the Open Source Initiative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-software license</span> License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft, that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use, and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License, and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, where it is also based.

ExtremeXOS is the software or the network operating system used in newer Extreme Networks network switches. It is Extreme Networks second generation operating system after the VxWorks based ExtremeWare operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software Freedom Conservancy</span> Non-profit organization

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects.

Open source license litigation involves lawsuits surrounding open-source licensed software. Many of the legal rights of open source software licensors enforceable against users violating licensing agreements are untested by the U.S. legal system. Free and open source software (FOSS) is distributed under a variety of free-software licenses, which are unique among other software licenses. Legal action against open source licenses involves questions about their validity and enforceability.

References

  1. ↑ "NewsForge | Moglen plans "general counsel's office for the entire movement"". Archived from the original on 2006-11-14. Retrieved 2006-11-14.
  2. ↑ SFLC Provides Ongoing GPLv3 Legal Support to FSF
  3. ↑ "And Now … Life After GPLv3" (Freedom Now)
  4. ↑ Richard Fontana
  5. ↑ SFLC notice on the lawsuit filed against Monsoon Multimedia, Inc.
  6. ↑ LinuxWatch: "The device behind the GPL's first U.S. legal test". Archived from the original on 2013-01-28.
  7. ↑ LinuxWatch: First U.S. GPL lawsuit filed [ permanent dead link ]
  8. ↑ BusyBox Developers and Monsoon Multimedia Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit
  9. ↑ Second Round of GPL Infringement Lawsuits Filed on Behalf of BusyBox Developers
  10. ↑ BusyBox Developers and Xterasys Corporation Agree to Settle GPL Lawsuit
  11. ↑ BusyBox Developers and High-Gain Antennas Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit
  12. ↑ BusyBox Developers File GPL Infringement Lawsuit Against Verizon Communications
  13. ↑ BusyBox Developers Agree To End GPL Lawsuit Against Verizon
  14. ↑ SFLC Files Another Round of GPL Violation Lawsuits on Behalf of BusyBox Developers
  15. ↑ GPLv2 copyright suit targets 14 firms on linuxgizmos.com by Eric Brown (Dec 14, 2009)
  16. ↑ Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, And Eleven Other Brands Named In SFLC Lawsuit on softwarefreedom.org
  17. ↑ Visual Display - Open Source on samsung.com "Please download the links below We use GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1, not GPLv3 and LGPLv3. Open Source License Notice License Agreement LN52A750.zip" (archived 2010)
  18. ↑ Samsung-Ln52b630 manual
  19. ↑ The Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. & Mr. Erik Andersen vs BestBuy, Samung, Westinghouse, JVC, Western Digital, Bosch, Phoebe Micro, Humax, ... (New York, 2009)
  20. ↑ "Docket for Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. v. Best Buy Co., Inc". CourtListener. Retrieved 2017-02-28.
  21. ↑ SFLC Files Lawsuit against Cisco on Behalf of the FSF
  22. ↑ Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations
  23. 1 2 "Team". Software Freedom Law Center. Retrieved 2014-04-27.
  24. ↑ Ropes and Gray (2012-11-12). "Justin C. Colannino, Ropes and Gray". Ropes and Gray. Archived from the original on 2013-02-01. Retrieved 2012-11-22.
  25. ↑ O'Reilly and Associates (2012-07-19). "Justin Colannino, Associate, Ropes and Gray, LLP". O'Reilly and Associates. Retrieved 2012-11-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.