Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

8 – Exploring Open Source for Educators: We’re Not in Kansas Anymore – Entering OS
phones, PDAs and home networking appliances to
mainframes and supercomputing clusters. Independent
software developers around the world, as
well as every large corporate IT buyer and seller,
and a surprisingly large proportion of individual
users, interact with the GPL.
Enforcing the General Public
Licence
Maintaining the legal power and influence of the GPL
has become the focus of one recent project, gplviolations.org
(Welte, 2006a). This is a GPL watch-dog
group founded by Harald Welte in 2004 (Welte, 2006b)
whose actions to date have primarily focused on violations
by businesses active in Germany and Holland, as
well as the rest of Europe, although many of the parent
companies may be elsewhere. Welte became concerned
about GPL enforcement around 2003 when he discovered
GPL’ed software he had written to work with the
Linux kernel (netfilter/iptables) was being used by companies
in a manner violating the licence (Welte, 2006b).
According to the project site: “After some time …
[Welte] discovered that the number of GPL violations
was far bigger than expected, as is the number of Free
Software projects whose copyrights are mistreated/
abused” (Welte, 2006b).
As Welte investigated, he found “more and more
cases of infringement … mostly in the embedded networking
market” (Welte, 2006b). By mid-2004, Welte’s
project had secured its first preliminary injunction in
favor of the GPL (Welte, 2006b). From there, Welte’s
work branched out. He began to protect other developers’
GPL’ed work that was similarly abused (Welte,
2006b). He gained financial backing from Linux developers
like Werner Almesberger and Paul “Rusty” Russell
who “transferred their rights in a fiduciary license
agreement to enable the successful gpl-violations.org
project to enforce the GPL” (Welte, 2006b). The companies
that gpl-violations.org claim have violated GPL
terms are not necessarily small companies. On March
14, 2005, Welte delivered a warning letter to 13 companies,
among which were listed Motorola and Acer
(Welte, 2005/2006). In September 2006, the organization
won a case against D-Link Germany GmbH, a subsidiary
of Taiwan’s D-Link Corporation (Welte, 2006c).
Other cases, settled out of court, have involved “Siemens,
Fujitsu-Siemens, Asus and Belkin” (Welte, 2004/2006).
As of June 2006, Welte’s project claimed successful
completion of 100 infringement cases: “Every GPL infringement
that we started to enforce was resolved in a
legal success, either in-court or out of court” (Welte,
2006b).
In a 2006 legal case of another sort (amended from
earlier actions), David Wallace claimed that the FSF—
through the GPL—was acting as a monopoly with
regard to operating systems under the US Sherman
Anti-Trust Act (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation,
Inc., March 20, 2006). In an ironic twist, Wallace
charged that the GPL was “foreclosing competition in
the market for computer operating systems” (Wallace v.
Free Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 2). In
reviewing the complaint, the court found that Wallace’s
“problem … [appeared] to be that GPL generates too
much competition, free of charge” (Wallace v. Free
Software Foundation, Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 5). In
reviewing the nature of the GPL and the GNU/Linux
licensing under this agreement, the court found, “the
GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free
competition and the distribution of computer operating
systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers.
These benefits include lower prices, better access and
more innovation” (Wallace v. Free Software Foundation,
Inc., March 20, 2006, p. 5). As Tai (2004) wrote, “The
recent attacks on the GPL … demonstrate how far the
GPL’s influences have come, but we may not have seen
the full impact of the GPL yet”.
Challenges for widespread
adoption
Those converted to freely sourced software in the last 10
years rank among Roger’s (1983) early adopters. If
Roger’s (1983) model holds true for the open source and
free software movements, we should expect a rapid upswing
in adoption as we enter the early majority to late
majority adoption phases. How quickly this will happen
can be more readily explained through the Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM) which looks at how perceptions
about user friendliness and usefulness of a technology
affect adoption over time (Davis, 1989). Another
factor that will affect acceptance is simple awareness and
knowledge of open source and free software. Potter
(2000) cites some concerns people held with regard to
freely sourced applications that tie in with Davis’s (1989)
TAM:
• product concerns: product viability and technical issues
such as security, scalability, and technical support;
100 Education for a Digital World