busybox

Busybox settles a second GPL suit

Programmers behind Busybox, a collection of utilities governed by the General Public License (GPL), have settled a second lawsuit that argued a company violated the widely used free and open-source license.

This time the company that settled is Xterasys, which makes networking products, said the Software Freedom Law Center, which represented the Busybox coders.

"As a result of the settlement, Xterasys has agreed to cease all binary distribution of BusyBox until SFLC confirms it has published complete corresponding source code on its Web site. Once SFLC verifies that the complete source code is available, Xterasys' full rights to distribute … Read more

GPL lawsuits: A reason to rejoice(?), not panic

BusyBox has been busy. With the help of the Software Freedom Law Center, it recently sued Verizon for infringing the GNU General Public License (GPL). This marks a distinct shift in strategy for Eben Moglen, the SFLC's counsel, as Pamela at Groklaw notes:

Remember how Eben Moglen used to say that negotiations were the best solution years ago, because the GPL was new and funds were limited? And then when he went to the Software Freedom Law Center he said he'd be in a position to do more? I think he told us the truth.

For the record, I like the conciliatory approach. As a lawyer by training, I heartily dislike the use of the law as a club. Occasionally it is needful to right wrongs against the otherwise weak and defenseless, but I'm not sure this is the case with BusyBox. I don't remember Erik Anderson (primary developer behind BusyBox) being particularly litigious when we worked together at Lineo back in 2000, but something seems to have changed.

Maybe he got fed up with people free-riding on open-source software, using it without abiding by its license terms. This certainly seems to be the case with Eben, who let loose on Tim O'Reilly at last year's OSCON for not being enough of a friend to free software.… Read more

Software Freedom Law Center goes after Verizon over GPL

The Software Freedom Law Center on Friday said it has filed a suit against Verizon Communications alleging that it has violated the terms of the General Public License, which governs the use of thousands of free and open-source software products.

The suit is the fourth that the SFLC has filed on behalf of two programmers who wrote BusyBox, a software utility package covered under the GPL. BusyBox is typically embedded in hardware devices that use the Linux open-source operating system.

The move reflects a more aggressive stance that the SFLC, which provides legal counsel to free and open-source developers, has … Read more

BusyBox settles Monsoon GPL lawsuit

Programmers behind the BusyBox collection of open-source utilities have settled a September lawsuit that contended Monsoon Multimedia's use of the software violated the General Public License (GPL).

Under the terms of the settlement, Monsoon may ship its Hava digital TV products using the BusyBox software without objection from BusyBox, according to a joint announcement Tuesday from Monsoon and the Software Freedom Law Center, which represents BusyBox.

In addition, Monsoon has agreed to appoint an open-source compliance officer to monitor the issue, to publish on its Web site the source code for the version of BusyBox it uses, to undertake &… Read more

The GPL to get its day in court

It seems that most of the world's open source-related lawsuits emerge from Utah, for whatever reason. First there was Caldera vs. Microsoft (which, of course, didn't have anything to do with open source, but for Caldera's inclusion). Then there was SCO. Somewhere along the way there was Linksys, which didn't have anything more to do with Utah than that I used to visit its offices, and I'm from Utah.

And now we have BusyBox (through the Software Freedom Law Center) suing Monsoon Multimedia, with BusyBox's project founder, Erik Andersen, a former colleague of mine … Read more