Social Life
First U.S. GPL lawsuit filed
For the first time in the U.S., a company is being taken to court for a GPL violation.
The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Sept. 20 that it had just filed the first ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients. The group’s clients are the two principal developers of BusyBox. BusyBox is a small-footprint application that implements a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities. It is commonly used in embedded systems, and is open-source software licensed under the GPL version 2.
The developers of BusyBox came to the SFLC after trying to talk Monsoon, the company which makes consumer devices primarily for home multimedia users, into honoring the conditions of the GPLv2. Unsuccessful with this, the SFLC has filed suit on the developers’ behalf against Monsoon.
Interestingly, Monsoon Multimedia is run by a highly experienced lawyer named Graham Radstone. According to his corporate biography, Radstone has an MA in Law from the University of Cambridge, England, and held the top legal spot at an unnamed “$1 billion private multinational company.” He also reportedly held a top management position with Philip Morris.
Previously, alleged GPL violations have all been settled by letters from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or other open-source organizations, pointing out the violation.
