It’s surprising that a dispute over the use of open source software in a model railway application would be the one to set the legal precedent, but that is what happened here:
Although some people viewed it as a tempest in a teapot, the long-running legal case Jacobsen v. Katzer stirred up some seminal open source issues. We first reported on the dust-up all the way back in August of 2008, noting that the dispute centered around — of all things — model train software.
Specifically, Jacobsen had developed JMRI, the Java Model Railroad Interface project. When Katzer built the code for the project into proprietary model train software, deleting existing copyright notices within the code, Jacobsen filed suit. Now, settlement documents are available online, and the end of the dispute points to a final victory for open source licenses.
The settlement documents show that Katzer will pay Jacobsen $100,000 over 18 months, cease using the JMRI code, and not attempt to register domains using the JMRI name. Previously, the legal dispute had gone all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the last legal stop before the Supreme Court. As Lawrence Lessig noted in a post, when the Court of Appeals upheld the Artistic License that governed the use of JMRI, it was “an important victory” for free licenses. Lessig noted that the decision had broad implications for many open source licenses.
Just because someone allows the use of source code freely does not mean you can, in effect, file off the serial numbers and pretend that it’s all your own work . . .
H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.
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I’ve had a bunch of Microsoft Access database files kicking around for the last several months, but due to version incompatibilities, I’ve been unable to open them. I didn’t want to buy a license for the program, just to pull my data out, so I’d looked for alternative ways to free my data from the proprietary clutches of Access.
I’d tried using Open Office, which includes a database program, but ran into the consequences of my own bad planning: Base (the OOo database component) could open Access files, but couldn’t do anything useful with them if they didn’t have a primary key. Most of my files were pretty basic flat files with a single table, so I’d never bothered to add a primary key (yes, I know: bad database practice).
Base would also let me export individual tables or queries to Calc (the spreadsheet component), but the process seemed pretty dicey — it locked up on me three times as I tried to save a new Calc spreadsheet as a .CSV file. I wasn’t comfortable that all the data in the table had been properly captured in the output, either.
Enter Mr. Nolan’s neat little MDB Viewer Plus utility (downloadable from here). It’s just a simple viewer for Microsoft Access files, but it worked a treat on extracting the tables I needed out of the proprietary MDB format to a .CSV I can import into something else (after this experience, something open source by preference).
Update: Aagh! Not quite as clean as I first thought. It appears that any date that has a value of greater than 12 for the day has been dropped. I wonder if this is an artifact of the difference between British and American usage (D/M/Y versus M/D/Y). Data normalization looks to be a lengthy task after all.
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