Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 24th Sep 2007 17:35 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Monsoon Multimedia, which was subjected to the first US lawsuit on non-compliance with the GPL, has published a press release in which they agree to make any modifications public and thereby complying to the requirements stipulated in the GPL license. "Monsoon Multimedia today announced efforts to fully comply with the GPL. Monsoon is in settlement negotiations with BusyBox to resolve the matter and intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. Monsoon will make modified BusyBox source code publicly available on the company web-site in the coming weeks."
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Member since:
2007-02-23
The GPL specifically states that you must either ship your modified source with the product (well, with the object, to be pedantic), or you must provide a written offer, valid for any third party, to obtain the code.
What is *NOT* acceptable is to say 'you can get it from the standard places' unless you've made arrangements with the standard places to keep it archived for 3 years. There's a lot of companies trying to skate under this clause as well, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
It is fear against exactly this kind of lawsuit and bad publicity that has caused a former employer to base their products on FreeBSD and to eliminate all GPL'd software from the flash image that goes inside their products. That company did dozens of releases a year, and making sure every last bit of GPL'd source was released and archived properly for 3 years was considered more effort than simply eliminating all GPL software.
The one bad thing about the settlement, assuming there will be one, is that there's no legal precedent set by it, so the world still doesn't know if the GPL is valid in the US, or the extent to which it can be enforced. All we still have are legal theories, although quite good, that haven't been tested in a court of law in the US.