A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in this blog that there was legal victory in a ground-breaking court case on the validity and enforcibility of the GPL.
Today, I have released this press release stating some more details on the case, including the name of the defendant: D-Link.
I'm quite happy to see that our arguments have convinced the court outright, and that we didn't have to go through a lengthy procedure of calling several prominent kernel developers as witnesses, and getting statements from technical experts or the like.
If you're interested in the (German) judgement of 16 pages, you can find it at my lawyers' website. An English translation is in the works, but will take another week or so.
We've already received some press coverage, mainly in Germany so far. Interestingly, in a statement of D-Link quoted by heise.de, D-Link seems determined to not take this to a higher court... which means that this judgement will soon be considered legally binding, and be one more tiny step in the clarification of legal questions on the GPL.
I'd like to thank my fellow developers Werner Almesberger and David Woodhouse, as well as my lawyer Dr. Till Jaeger and his colleagues for all their support and work. A lot of time and effort was spent in preparation of this case, and as it turned out, exactly that preparation brought the case to a quick ending.