Artifex Software, the company behind the open source Ghostscript PDF processing software, has filed a lawsuit against voting machine vendor Diebold and its subsidiary Premier Election Solutions, Ars Technica reported earlier this week. Last year, Jim March of BlackBoxVoting.org was investigating voting irregularities in Arizona. As part of his investigatios, he posted some inquiries about Ghostscript usage on the Ghostscript mailing list, with a sidenote of "is that a GPL problem?" And yes, it turned out it was.
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Diebold faces GPL infringement lawsuit over their voting machines
Does the GPL extend to (cross-)compilers?
Access to the full source code is an essential aspect of open source software, perhaps even the most essential aspect of all. But what good is source code if it cannot be compiled into an executable? Fortunately this is rarely a problem. Most open source software is designed to compile with the well-known gcc compiler, a standard component of most Linux distributions. With dozens of supported platforms, it is rare to have open source that you can't compile. But when you do, can you demand a copy of the compiler from the developer?