Software Freedom Law Center files more BusyBox GPL infringement suits

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The Software Freedom Law Center has filed two new GPL infringement lawsuits against hardware companies on behalf of the BusyBox developers.

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Why would a company which wishes to keep the source private use BusyBox instead of crunched BSD binary is beyond me, but I guess, to each his own.
A lot of these companies have very little software experiance and don't work on the actual software themselves. Electronic Engineering is very different from Software Engineering.. it's like two different worlds.

They often simply purchase programming services from other companies and then put what they are given on their hardware.

I don't remember, but I think the first lawsuit (which settled out of court, btw) the plantiff's excuse was that they were never given the source code themselves and thus it's not their fault.

Something like that. We are all human beings and this sort of thing happens. The vast majority of the time when the offending party realises that nobody is after them for money and only want access to the source code they stop caring and release the code.

The way the GNU/FSF folks have the licensing setup, and how most other GPL/LGPL people do it, they make it so that if you use the source code in your software it needs to be openned source. If your just using the GNU/Busybox/Linux/etc stuff to run your software then there is no legal requirement to release it.

So for the most part there isn't any difference (besides technical differences like protocol and hardware support) between using BSD vs Linux/Busybox, except you have to include a written offer for the GPL'd source code in with your product documentation.

This activity may drive some people to use BSD code, which is fine.. but it's not a big deal.

Generally the FSF tries to keep this sort of thing a secret so you don't hear about how common this is. They just don't want people emailing and being generally nasty to these companies. This is what generally realy hurts relationships between the companies and GPL'd projects, not so much the license itself.
Speaking of GPL compliance... Does anyone know if these guys are complying with their obligations?

I see no links for any software or source code downloads on their site, and I can't even figure out what distro(s) and (mostly which) tools their software is based on.
4 posts