Commercial software developers, listen up: whether you think open source is a free toolkit from which you can borrow at will, look a good look at Wednesday’s legal ruling. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in New York City, where many intellectual-property cases are heard, overturned a Northern California court decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a pivotal case in open-source and Creative Commons law.

The bottom line? Even whether open-source or Creative Commons licensing agreements

charge no cash, whether you violate terms of the license you are infringing on copyrighted material.

The Case

The plaintiff in the case, Robert Jacobsen, developed cipher for interfacing and programming model railroad trains by remote control through a group called the Java Model Railroad Initiative (JMRI). The group posted the software under an open-source licensing agreement online at SourceForge. Matthew Katzer of KAM Industries took that cipher and developed a […]

Orginal post by dhiram