BusyBox Busy With Two New Suits

November 26th, 2007 by Justin Ryan

The developers of BusyBox made history a month ago with the settlement of the first lawsuit ever filed over violation of the GNU General Public License. Now it's making history again, with two more GPL suits.

The new litigation, again filed by the Software Freedom Law Center on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleges violation of the GPL by High Gain Antennas, LLC and Xterasys Corp. According to the SFLC, both companies have failed to provide source code for applications that include GPL-licensed code from BusyBox.

Both companies were reportedly advised of the violations by third-parties, and then received specific pre-litigation notice from the SFLC, but failed to remedy the infringements. SFLC director Daniel Ravicher stressed that the suits were last-resort measures aimed at violators who refused to come into compliance — his comments appeared to be an attempt to warn other potential defendants against ignoring the SFLC.

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Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
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