A recent US federal appeals court ruling ( which overrules a previous lower court ruling ), has indicated that open source software now has the same protection under copyright law as other content. It’s quite interesting that the Business Software Alliance ( BSA ), which in the past has been the watchdog for such commercial software heavyweights as Microsoft and Oracle, might be called upon to protect open source products – any bets on whether they would?
The issue at hand here is that under the previous ruling, the remedies or compensation for a contract disagreement would be zero – or close to it – as Open Source software often has no cost. Under the later ruling, contract violations now carry the full weight of normal copyright infringements.