Munich Court vindicates GPL, again
Free software enforcer Harald Welte was granted another preliminary injunction by the district court of Munich, on grounds of GPL violation, this time against firewall producer Fortinet. Way to go Munich!
Welte, who is a developer in the netfilter/iptables core team was granted the first preliminary injunction exactly one year ago, in an identical case against firewall producer Sitecom. The District Court of Munich later upheld the injunction, marking the first time in history that a FOSS license was interpreted in a court of law (MySQL nearly managed to score GPL recognition in a US Court, against NuSphere in 2002, but the two companies finally settled). I guess embedded firewall makers can’t keep their mitts out of the cookie jar, but I can sympathize (sort of); iptables being the finest firewall software available…
Welte went on to establish gpl-violations.org with the stated aim of “gathering, maintaining and distributing information about people who use and distribute GPL licensed free software without adhering to the license terms”. In March, he party-crashed the latest CeBIT to personally hand warning letter to 13 companies not in compliance with the GPL (reportedly, even big wigs like Motorola, Acer, AOpen and Micronet). Since forming gpl-violations.org, he has made 25 agreements with companies that were violating the GPL, as well as setting up three preliminary injunctions and one court order. Legal action on the Fortinet case was made possible by Werner Almesberger signing his rights to the initrd code over to Welte.
As Welte said in a recent interview to ZDNet Australia, defending FOSS from corporate depradations is vital to it’s sustainability:
You can use all the code out there for free, but if you do modifications you have to give them back to the community — it’s a fairness thing. If we allowed violations to become common, the system would be out of equilibrium. This would result in fewer contributions and it would have a large negative impact on the motivation of developers.
If one developer with no legal background can singlehandedly score so many successes in so little time, I wonder what would happen if others assisted in keeping the vigil. Hopefully, the recently established and much touted Software Freedom Law Center will provide Welte with needed backing. He himself remains optimistic that other free software enthusiasts will actively contribute to his crusade.
