The law and Open Source software

Network Computing posts an interesting, but rather error-prone, essay on Open Source, Free Software, and copyright law: “Licenses that are mass-produced for the open-source community, however, may not fare well under state commercial codes. For example, the GPL grants a direct license from the copyright holder to each developer or user with each software transfer. As software passes through the hands of users, offer and acceptance becomes diluted, and courts may find this unenforceable. Also, any license amended by one party without agreement on the terms of sale by the other party amounts to a nonbinding “shrink-wrap” license.”