Friday 3 September, 2010
Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates copyright
The Palm Pre is using PDF technology without proper licensing, Artifex alleges
Mikael Ricknäs (IDG News Service) 07/12/2009 07:53:00
Tags: pdf, Palm Pre, Palm, legal, lawsuits, GPL violation, gpl, copyright, Artifex
Have your say!7

Artifex Software is suing Palm over the PDF (Portable Document Format) viewer in Palm's Pre smartphone, it said on Thursday.

Artifex alleges that Palm has copied Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, and integrated it into the Palm Pre's PDF viewer application without the proper licensing conditions.

Artifex requires that an entire application must be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) if muPDF is part of the application.

If the software is not licensed under the GNU GPL, then Artifex requires a commercial license in order to use muPDF, according to the company's licensing terms.

Artifex alleges that Palm has done neither and has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Palm's documentation for the Pre includes a mention of muPDF, which it says has been licensed under the GNU GPL.

Palm Europe did not reply to questions about the lawsuit. The Pre was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and went on sale in the U.S in June.

More about Palm, NU, Consumer Electronics

Comments

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 23:01 — BobT (not verified)

Not even GPLed

From the mupdf README:

This code is under the same licensing scheme as Ghostscript.
AFPL and one year or major release later GPL.
Because there have been no major releases yet; AFPL it is.

If there were copyright notices on the source files, they've been stripped off.

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 22:44 — Ricardo Bánffy (not verified)

Alternative

They must publish the source code to the PDF viewer _or_ restructure it in a way it doesn't link to muPDF.

Or they can contact the copyright holder (if there is a single point of contact) of muPDF and offer to license it to Palm under, say, LGPL, for a fee. This would help finance the development of muPDF.

I think this last option would be preferrable to forcing Palm to open up its PDF viewer. Is it _that_ interesting?

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 20:29 — Amendmen7 (not verified)

No, not that

John, to comply with GPL it is insufficient to provide the source code for the open-source library USED in the project. Rather, if you use that library you must likewise provide the source code for your OWN derivative project using it.

Since Palm didn't provide all the source code of their PDF viewer, they are not in complying with the terms of license.

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 20:17 — Anonymous (not verified)

I don't know, John.

What is the name of the PDF application on the Pre? If the source code for that is available then they have complied with the requirements.
Simply providing the source code for MuPDF is not enough.

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 18:18 — Anonymous (not verified)

Dear John,

Its not enough just to send back the patches, if they link to it (and it looks like they do) they need to release the source code they wrote too.

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 17:28 — Anonymous (not verified)

Yes that, but not that…

Thats not the source to the palm viewer, thats the source to mupdf. What this is saying is that the palm viewer is clearly based on mupdf but it isn't being distributed in accordance with the license.

The artifex folks have had the "GPL or, at your option, commercial license" model now for over 20 years now and they have quite a few clueful people around. I doubt they'd screw up on this.

Mon, 07/12/2009 - 15:16 — John Hoffman (not verified)

You mean this?

http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.1/index.html
http://palm.cdnetworks.net/opensource/1.3.1/mupdf-1.0.tar
http://palm.cdnetworks.net/opensource/1.3.1/mupdf-1.0.tar-patches.tgz

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