We Americans can be so stupid at times. In the country of "land of the free", we spend too much of our efforts working to restrict the freedom of others.
Tomorrow's legal fight may be over Web browser add-ons that let people avoid advertisements. These add-ons are growing in functionality and popularity, which has led legal experts we surveyed this week to speculate about when the first lawsuit will be filed.
"It is fair to say the GPL does not intend to make it easy for proprietary software.The intention is to liberate code and ensure continual downstream benefits to users. So, yes, it's going to be easier to integrate open source code into a GPL'ed environment. And, as it should be!
It is important that community environments also ensure that open source developers benefit more than proprietary developers. It hasn't been that way in J! [Joomla!] or in Mambo."
--Amy Stephen, OpenSourceCommunity.org, Comment to CMS Report's Is bridging a GPL application with a non-GPL application legal?
Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons. Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.
From time to time we like to see the giants fall. However, I think in this particular case if the giant falls so does the little guy. If the Belgian court's recent ruling against Google becomes the "standard" that all sites will be judged, the ruling would likely have a negative effect for most bloggers and the readers who visit those blogs. As reported by CNET: