Found at…http://boinc.berkeley.edu/legal.html
Why the BOINC public license has been modified
July 25, 2003
United Devices is a company that develops software for distributed
computing, primarily for corporate intranets. The designer of BOINC,
Dr. David Anderson, worked for United Devices from 2000 to 2002.
In April 2003 United Devices filed a lawsuit against Dr. Anderson and
his co-workers on BOINC, claiming that BOINC uses trade secrets of
United Devices and is a competitive threat to United Devices. United
Devices obtained a court order requiring that work on BOINC stop, and
that BOINC source code be made unavailable.
While we believe the lawsuit to be without merit, fighting it in court
would have taken many months. During this time BOINC (and to some
extent SETI@home) would be paralyzed. Therefore we pursued an
out-of-court settlement with United Devices. A settlement was
finalized and signed on July 15, 2003.
As part of the settlement, we agreed to modify the public license
under which the BOINC source code is distributed, to ban the use of
the source code in commercial products. This restriction will remain
in effect for 18 months from the date of the settlement, or until
United Devices goes out of business. The new public license is here.
While the commercial-use restriction is in effect, BOINC is not “open
source” according to the definition of the Open Source Initiative.
Therefore we can no longer host the project at Sourceforge.net. The
source code will be available on the BOINC web site.
We are very grateful to the University of California, which generously
advised us and paid our legal fees during this process.
