A Big Victory for F/OSS: Jacobsen v. Katzer is Settled

"A long running case of great significance to the legal underpinnings of free and open source/open source software (F/OSS) has just settled on terms favorable to the F/OSS developer. The settlement follows a recent ruling by a U.S. Federal District Court judge that affirmed several key rights of F/OSS developers under existing law.

"That case is Jacobsen v. Katzer, and the settlement documents were filed in court just after 9:00 AM this morning. Links to each of them can be found later in this blog entry. The brief background of the case, the legal issues at stake, and the settlement details are as follows.

"The software underlying such an important legal dispute is almost charmingly inconsequential from a commercial point of view - model railroad software. But to the litigants, the stakes were high relative to their resources and their commitment to that niche. The plaintiff, Robert Jacobsen, is a software developer member of the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) Project, and the defendant, Matthew Katzer, is the owner of a proprietary vendor of model train software called KAMIND associates, d/b/a KAM Industries."

Complete Story

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• Licensing 101 for Open Source Projects: Choosing an Open Source License(Jul 09, 2009)
• Special Episode: Amicus Brief in Jacobsen v. Katzer(Jun 18, 2009)
• Myths of Linux - People Don't Care About Licensing(Sep 18, 2008)
• Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow(Aug 15, 2008)
• OK. But What Does It Mean? (Jacobsen v. Katzer)(Aug 15, 2008)