Palm Sued Over PDF Technology Dispute

pdf icon San Rafael based Artifex software has brought a suit against Palm Inc. in the U.S. District Court for northern California. The company claims Palm Inc. infringed on its copyright for its PDF rendering engine which is used in webOS.

Artifex is the developer and copyright owner of muPDF, a high-performance PDF rendering engine targeted at mobile devices. The company alleges that Palm improperly integrated muPDF in the Palm Pre's "PDF viewer" application without Artifex's authorization and in violation of the GPL.

The muPDF software is available under the GPL or a commercial license. Artifex's main dispute claims that Palm has not bought a commercial license. The company claims Palm's own documentation admits including Artifex's muPDF in Palm's Pre product as the PDF rendering engine in their PDF viewer application, but Palm neither obtained a commercial license from Artifex nor complied with the terms of the GPL.

"Artifex makes the choice simple for those who copy Artifex software for distribution: Comply with the terms of the GPL, sign an OEM license agreement with Artifex, or do not distribute our software," says Miles Jones, president of Artifex Software.

Palm's webOS PDF viewing application ships standard on both the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. It even includes a default document which details Palm's open source technologies and related information. In addition, Palm maintains an open source portal where users can view and download the source code and patch files for many open source webOS components including the PDF viewer in question.

Thanks to Slashdot for the tip.

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Less Than Meets the Eye?

DarthRepublican @ 12/7/2009 4:57:20 PM # Q
A quick perusal of Palm's Open Source repository for webOS 1.3.1:

http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.1/index.html

Shows .tar and gzip files for mupdf. So whatever GPL violation Palm may have committed has either already been repaired or is so minor that it can be easily fixed.
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RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
SeldomVisitor @ 12/7/2009 5:15:37 PM # Q
Palm is accused of violating the Commercial Use part of the license. Not having the license in front of me, I hesitate to emphatically state what that means, but I can imagine it means Palm hasn't made ENOUGH stuff open source.

RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
pmjoe @ 12/7/2009 7:18:51 PM # Q
I don't know enough about how webOS works, but if this PDF renderer is GPL and integrated into the OS, Palm would need to release all related source code for whatever binary program uses the renderer. Just posting mupdf and some patches would likely not be sufficient (admitting I didn't look at the posted patches).
RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
jca666us @ 12/8/2009 4:43:07 AM # Q
Artifex's main dispute claims that Palm has not bought a commercial license.

...

Palm neither obtained a commercial license from Artifex nor complied with the terms of the GPL.

Palm using things w/o the proper authority to do so? NEVER!!!

BTW, when is itunes syncing being re-enabled???

RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
SeldomVisitor @ 12/8/2009 5:22:53 AM # Q
I believe THAT particular wording is incorrect. Palm didn't have to buy anything (I think), but they had to do SOMETHING more than they did.

For example, you take a piece of GPL software and add it into your own proprietary software and then distribute it, you have to make the source for your WHOLE (distinct) thing available.

Or something like that.

RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
SeldomVisitor @ 12/8/2009 5:26:24 AM # Q
Okay, HERE'S exactly what Palm is accused of not doing:

http://www.artifex.com/pressreleases/palm.htm

so they don't actually have to pay anything, they just have to reveal more than they did (or, apparently, they CAN pay something and NOT reveal more than they did...I didn't know the GPL even allowed that).

RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
BaalthazaaR @ 12/8/2009 7:27:55 AM # Q
SeldomVisitor wrote:
Okay, HERE'S exactly what Palm is accused of not doing:

http://www.artifex.com/pressreleases/palm.htm

so they don't actually have to pay anything, they just have to reveal more than they did (or, apparently, they CAN pay something and NOT reveal more than they did...I didn't know the GPL even allowed that).

Dual licenses are permitted, but Palm gets to choose which license they want to use. The link is not really useful since it doesn't say how the GPL was violated.

If the GPL code is in a separate library then the binary doesn't have to be open source. I believe if you ship the source for the library, it is fine. I am not an expert, though.

Darth, What are the contents of the tar/gzip?

RE: Less Than Meets the Eye?
SeldomVisitor @ 12/8/2009 8:19:36 AM # Q
According to the PR-Fluff:

== "...Palm's own documentation admits including Artifex's muPDF in Palm's
== Pre product as the PDF rendering engine in their PDF viewer application..."

so it looks to me like Palm can throw money at Artifex OR Palm can GPL the source to their PDF viewer and be done with this.

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PDF Viewer code

jnuneznj @ 12/13/2009 8:51:58 PM # Q
They posted the muPDF source but they need to post the actual PDF Viewer application source.

Wonder if they need to post the binary libraries linked to the application.

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