Yesterday’s appeals court decision as reported this morning in the New York Times is a milestone for the open source world. As with many inflection points, the actual event seems pretty modest – in this case having to do with software for model trains. But the impact is large. It reinforces the rights of creators and authors to supply their work under whatever terms they wish. More specifically, it is a clear statement that copyright protection applies in this case of an open source software license, and by implication should apply for others. (btw this is a non-lawyers view so feel free to form your own opinion, or correct mine)

The use of open source software is simply how software is developed today. Our experience continues to show that most application development today is over fifty percent open source by volume (lines of code or MB of material). So the more we drive out any ambiguities in its status, the better off we are. There are still a lot of areas to be sorted out – licenses embedded within other licenses, patents, etc., but this ruling goes a long way toward making the notion of copyright unambiguous, and that is a big step forward