Grsecurity maker finally coughs up $300k to foot open-source pioneer Bruce Perens' legal bill
Found on The Register on Monday, 30 March 2020
Spengler and OSS sued Perens for a June 2017 blog post in which Perens ventured the opinion that grsecurity, Open Source Security's Linux kernel security enhancements, could expose customers to potential liability under the terms of the General Public License (GPL).
OSS says that customers who exercise their rights to redistribute its software under the GPL will no longer receive software updates – the biz wants to be paid for its work, a problem not really addressed by the GPL. Perens, the creator of the open-source definition, pointed out that section six of the GPLv2 prohibits modifications of the license terms.
That lawsuit sure backfired. They should have just accepted the GPL terms without trying to wiggle around and ignore the fine print.