Palm is already facing increased competition from Android devices. It has also been struggling to get developers to write applications for its nascent webOS, and struggling to remain relevant among smartphone makers. It received still more bad news last Thursday: a lawsuit.
Artifex Software is suing Palm over the PDF (Portable Document Format) viewer found in Palm's Pre smartphone, it said on Thursday. The company alleges in its lawsuit that Palm has copied and integrated Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, without licensing the engine properly.
If muPDF is part of an application, than that application, according to Artifex, must be licensed in one of two ways. Either the entire application must be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), or if the software is not licensed under GPL, then Palm must have a commercial license in order to use muPDF.
Palm has done neither, Artifex says, and as such Artifex has filed lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Palm's documentation for the Pre includes a mention of muPDF, which it says has been licensed under the GNU GPL, but that would require, according to Artifex, all of the OS to be licensed under GPL.
It is unclear if this lawsuit would apply to the Palm webOS platform as a whole, and thus also to the newly introduced Palm Pixi, as well.
Palm has been already sitting under the spectre of a possible Apple lawsuit over portions of webOS. Apple has, for example, threatened to sue over the multi-touch capabilities of the Pre's web browser.
Written by Michael Santo
HULIQ.com
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
