Ghostscript Files Suit Against US Election Machine Manufacturers

Nov 06, 2008

Artifex Software, the company behind Ghostscript, has filed a lawsuit against a subsidiary company (PES) of the electronic voting machine manufacturers Diebold due to alleged infringements in copyright.

Ghostscript is a dual licensed software that can raster, modify and print Postscript and PDF documents. Payment to the Artifex Commercial License is required when used commercially, otherwise the software can run under the GPL.

The voting machines in question were, for example, used in the U.S. Presidential Elections on Tuesday. Ghostscript was presumably used to print out electronic voting data. Artifex is demanding damages of 150.000 USD and has asked the court to confiscate the machines (reported by InformationWeek). The court is still waiting for official reactions from Diebold and PES.

The source code of the voting machines became public in 2003 when Diebold developers placed the highly secret software on a public FTP server. There the code was downloaded and freely published.

Related content

  • Comment

     

  • Brazil to Use Linux-based Voting System

    The Brazilian election authority has announced that voting systems based on Linux will be used for the election later this year.

  • Welcome

    The nature of the print publishing industry demands that I write this column some time before you read it. The first copies go on sale two weeks after our deadline, and, depending on where you live in the world, you could be seeing this issue one month or even two months after these words reach layout. Print publishing lives on because it has many admirable qualities, but low latency is not one of those benefits. This introduction is my graceful way of apologizing that what I'm thinking about now is probably not what you're thinking about when you read this. I'm thinking about the election in the US, which is happening the very day I write this column. You already know who won, and you are happily free from having to think about it, but maybe you should.

  • Free Software Projects

    Midwives battling bureaucracy, parties fighting against the general public’s lack of interest, and users needing to synchronize their data – here are three open source tools that attempt to solve the problems of the world.

  • Welcome

    I get this familiar feeling whenever an election year rolls around. I guess it is kind of like despair mixed with something more proactive, like maybe annoyance. I'm not talking about politics exactly, although I will admit that politics get pretty annoying. What really concerns me now is the backward nature of voting technology and the sense that nothing ever gets done about it.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News