Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates GPL
The Palm Pré is a nifty little phone. However, the fact that you can view PDFs on it, albeit useful, is under scrutiny as it appears Palm failed to check the licenses of the software they were using.
When working on closed/embedded projects that you distribute, the GPL requires you to make you application open source as well – the LGPL requires you use the library in a DLL/.so form – it’s all fairly simple. License checking is time consuming but worthwhile as it means you end up with a product that you have at least tried to protect from potential lawsuits.
That also said, open source developers should consider dual licensing (a bit like Nokia with Qt). This way, if a large company wants to use your code, you make a reasonable amount of money out of it to fund the GPL/LGPL versions.
Doing it that way may well mean breaking Stallman’s view of the world – but there is his view… and the way the world actually works.
Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates copyright – Artifex, copyright, gpl, GPL violation – Techworld.
