While we've discussed how extreme views in the open source community can, at times, rival the way the entertainment industry acts towards those who violate licenses, reader Nick Coghlan writes in to point to an article that highlights how different they are in many cases, with Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), putting forth new guidelines that encourage people not to jump to conclusions when they see potential violations, and to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone they suspect of violating the license. Compare that to the tens of thousands of threat letters sent out by the RIAA, at times with little real evidence.

On Wednesday, the Software Freedom Law Center filed a lawsuit to enforce the GPL against a company that has been distributing GPL-derived software without disclosing the source code, as the GPL requires. The SFLC says this is the first US copyright infringement lawsuit it has ever filed for infringement of the GPL. Traditionally, SFLC head Eben Moglen has worked to settle disputes with companies without going to court. But in this case the lawsuit was filed less than a month after SFLC first contacted the defendant, Monsoon Multimedia, about its violation of the license. Luis Villa suggests a couple of possible reasons they moved so quickly. One is that Monsoon failed to respond to the SFLC's letters, leaving them little choice but to go to court. Another factor is the recent Jacobsen decision, which called into question the enforceability of open source software licenses. The SFLC may have felt its chances of winning on appeal were not as good with the Jacobsen case, which is more complicated and involves a less popular license. And so instead of appealing Jacobsen, they may have fast-tracked a case they believe will make it more likely they'll win on appeal.

This will be an important case because it will help clarify the legal status of the GPL and other copyleft licenses. The Free Software Foundation argues that the GPL is a license, and that any violation of the GPL results in copyright infringement. That would entitle the authors of GPLed software not only to monetary damages but also to prohibit further use of the software by the infringing party. But other legal scholars think the GPL may be interpreted as a contract, in which case only monetary damages would be available. And because GPLed software is given away for free, it's an open question how those damages would be calculated. It's conceivable that a judge could hold that the proper amount of monetary damages is zero since the software is being given away for free. The SFLC is clearly trying to avoid that outcome by emphasizing that the software in question is sold by "more than 100 manufacturers all over the world, including IBM, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Siemens."