Federal Court: An Open-Source License Is an Enforceable Contract
A federal court has set the precedent that licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) can be treated like legal contracts, and developers can legitimately sue when those contracts are breached, reports Keith Collins for the digital news outlet Quartz.
The GNU GPL requires that anyone using GPL-licensed software to produce some other software, must provide the resulting software as open-sourced with the same license if it’s released to the public. Or the second developer could pay a licensing fee to the original developer.
South Korean developer Hancom Office incorporated an open-source PDF interpreter called Ghostscript into its word-processing software, but it declined to open-source its software or to pay Ghostware’s developer.