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The current edition is the Fourth Edition, which has a red cover.

Below I will be listing updates that occurred after the last date of publication and will apply to the fifth edition (If I do one! No promises).

• 1/6/25. Oracle v. Remini Street.
• 1/10/25. Free software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL.
• An additional point on distribution: The US copyright law allows for a limited disclosure not to be considered publication, and therefore distribution. This is called “limited publication.” And while this idea can be attractive to characterize, say, a limited beta as not constituting distribution, it may not be enough.  See page 6 of https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap1900/ch1900-publication.pdf. If you look at the examples in that document you will see that they don’t sound much like a limited beta. 
• The WordPress and WP Engine dispute. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/12/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/. This is not strictly about open source licensing, but represents an ongoing business battle between the developer of WordPress and a company that sells online access to WordPress.
• MongoDB, Inc. v. FerretDB Inc. (1:25-cv-00641), District Court, D. Delaware, May 23, 2025. This case is not strictly about open source licensing, though the claim arose from FerretDB claiming to be an open source alternative to MongDB.
• July 21, 2025. German case against Chinese auto manufacturer. The case alleges that failure to provide open source notices and offers is a defect in title.
• UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc.: In the 1970s and 1980s, the University of California, Berkeley developed BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) as an enhanced version of AT&T’s Unix. Initially, BSD contained AT&T code and could only be distributed to those with AT&T Unix licenses. By the late 1980s, Berkeley researchers worked to remove all AT&T code and replace it with their own, culminating in the 1991 release of Net/2, which they believed was free of AT&T intellectual property. In April 1992, AT&T’s Unix System Laboratories (USL) sued Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi) and later amended the suit to include the University of California itself. UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc. The trigger was BSDi’s commercial sale of BSD/386 for $995 (a fraction of AT&T’s System V Unix price) and use of the phone number 1-800-ITS-UNIX. USL claimed that BSD contained proprietary Unix code and trade secrets, and requested an injunction to halt distribution of Net/2 In 1993, the court denied the preliminary injunction, expressing doubt about the validity of USL’s intellectual property claims. The judge noted that AT&T had released Unix 32V in 1978 but failed to properly affix copyright notices to thousands of copies and didn’t copyright it until 1992, potentially invalidating their copyright. The lawsuit was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley’s favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. USL also agreed not to file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the upcoming 4.4BSD release. The lawsuit slowed BSD development for nearly two years while its legal status was uncertain. During this period, Linux gained significant ground, as it had no such legal ambiguity. WikipediaChannel Futures Linus Torvalds himself has acknowledged that if BSD had been freely available at the time, he probably wouldn’t have created Linux.