The GPL gets its day in court

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 33, No. 23 (March 7, 2002). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

The Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL) has received what is widely thought to be its first test in court. Though the event might sound dull and inconsequential, court cases involving the GPL are important because many free software packages are distributed under the terms of the GPL. If you use Linux, chances are you use lots of GPL’d software in every login session. Commercial credibility of free software (and, by association, open source software) is also at stake.

For those unfamiliar with the free software movement, I’ll slow down for an orientation. GNU (which is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”) and, later, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are projects started by Richard Stallman, who has a background with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “A stark moral choice” is how Stallman describes the basis for his philosophical views pertaining to software. He sees proprietary software as a destructive force in software communities and would prefer to share with and help his neighbors rather than signing non-disclosure agreements promising to disengage from those around him.

Stallman’s GNU Project seeks to create, maintain, and distribute a free system—including operating system and software tools—to give hackers an alternative to proprietary software. (Note that a hacker is someone who likes to program and use computers in clever ways, not a computer vandal correctly called a “cracker.” This suggests a funny slogan for computer security: “Cracker, please!”) An important point lurks here: it’s only coincidental that free software is free, i.e., available at no charge. The “free” in “free software” is in the same sense as the French word libre, from which we get the English word “liberty.” Hackers sometimes use “free as in beer” or “free as in freedom” to disambiguate. Maybe it’s more effective to explain things to hackers in terms of beer, but there’s a more likely explanation. Hippies wanted free love, and hackers are the hippies of the software world. Most hackers probably want free love too, but so much computer science makes one a realist and, what’s worse, is a hindrance when trying to impress chicks. We settle and wish for free beer.

According to one account of the hearing, Judge Patti Saris, who presided over the hearing at the U.S. District Court in Boston, expressed her surprise that between twenty and thirty people had shown up to listen to two companies argue over dry issues. MySQL AB, the company that maintains, distributes, and supports the MySQL database server software, alleged that a company called NuSphere violated MySQL AB trademarks and violated the terms of MySQL’s license, the GPL. NuSphere filed a lawsuit of its own, alleging breach of contract and unfair competition. Judge Saris indicated no intention to rule on the licensing issue at the hearing, but, according to John Palfrey, “amused the crowd by referring to the free software movement as ‘like a religious movement.’”

Court cases can be long and drawn out, and sifting through all the legal minutiae in this case may take some time. The hope is that some interesting (but good!) precedents will result. If you’re interested, you can keep up with developments in the case at Declan McCullagh’s Politech (www.politechbot.com), a site that publishes analyses of interesting mixtures of technology and politics.