Monsoon Settles GPL Suit

The landmark lawsuit against Monsoon Media for infringement of the GNU General Public License, Version 2, has come to an amicable close. The parties released a statement today outlining the terms.

In exchange for the dismissal, Monsoon is appointing a Compliance Officer, to prevent future infringements, will make the source code available for download from it's website, will make efforts to contact affected users, and will pay undisclosed damages to the plaintiffs, presumably to cover the costs incurred in bringing the suit.

The suit, which was filed on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, a GPL-licensed utility for Unix systems, represented a landmark in the defense of open licensing. The suit was the first GPL infringement suit to be filed, and had it gone to trial, would have provided important case law for the treatment of Open Source software.

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