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