The SFC was originally set up and funded by the SFLC in 2006 and is a non-profit entity that has been involved in enforcing the GNU General Public Licence, the licence under which the Linux kernel is published.

As iTWire reported, there have been unconfirmed reports that the spat between the two organisations is due to differences between the head of SFLC, Eben Moglen, and the head of SFC, Bradley Kuhn.

Responding to a query from iTWire as to what had led to the stoush between the SFLC and the SFC, the SFC's Brett Smith said: "Due to the action before the PTO, we have no comment on that at this time beyond what’s in our blog post."

The SFC had posted its take on the stoush last week; the SFLC responded with its own version of events on Monday.

In its post, the SFLC claimed that it had tried to settle the issue by talking to the SFC but had not been able to arrange a meeting, despite trying to do so for three months.

Some members of the community say that the SFLC wants to take over the functions that the SFC has been carrying out and this is behind its appeal to the PTO.

There have been differences in the free and open source software community over the manner in which the GPL is enforced. This led recently to a recent agreement among kernel developers on a method for enforcement, whereby those who were suspected of infringements would be given extra time to come into compliance.

When this agreement was published online, the SFC issued a statement backing it. The agreement was largely prompted by the actions of one Patrick McHardy who has been somewhat robust in enforcing the rights he claims to have in the kernel due to code that he has written.

A recent enforcement case, involving developer Christoph Hellwig, has also not gone down too well. Hellwig filed a case against the company VMware but lost in August 2016. An appeal against the verdict has been made.

Judging from comments from members of the community — which can be seen on Linux Weekly News, a website that serves as some kind of sparring ground — Moglen's actions have not gone down well with a majority.