The Software Freedom Law Center has filed the first US infringement case to defend the General Public License version 2. The case has been brought against Monsoon Multimedia, a specialist in video viewing and capturing devices, which has offices in Silicon Valley and in New Delhi. SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher told The Register: "This case could have far-reaching implications because it's the first case in the US to enforce copyright in GPL."
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Member since:2006-01-16
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-02-17
It won't go to a court case. Monsoon Multimedia will find that they are obliged by the GPL to publish the source code for BusyBox, and they will determine that they may as well do just that because BusyBox is already open source anyway. This course of action is immeasurably cheaper for Monsoon Multimedia than going to court would be.
As soon as Monsoon Multimedia publish the source code, the whole lawsuit will go away for them.
A similar thing happened recently with a company called "Parallels" and a product for the Apple which used GRUB.
Member since:2005-07-12
>> Looking passed your broken English deathshadow...
Conversational prose is not broken English; using the word passed instead of past is - as is your own use of unrelated sentence fragments. Helf hit it on the head - what a maroon, next we'll brake and axel, our troops will go rouge (better dead than red I always say), eco-nuts will try to stop the cutting down of timbre, there'll be ignorant ideas and points will be mute: Oh the humanity!
As to most everyone else who responded so far it looks like nobody got the joke. I KNOW what they mean and what this is about. Just to clarify, my point was this part of the article:
>> Monsoon lost its right to distribute BusyBox code
>> because it was, according to the SFLC, not adhering
>> to the terms of the GPL; it was not distributing
>> machine readable code that would allow end-users of
>> the product to modify the software.
Again I ask: Machine readable code? (and yes, that too is proper English.) Last time I checked the only code that was 'machine readable' was native bytecode, often called an executable or binary. If they didn't include that then they had no product. 
Last time I checked the GPL was about source code, not binaries...
Oh, and remind me not to try and use intellectual humor in here - it's apparantly wasted.
Edited 2007-09-23 15:27
Member since:
2007-03-14
Looking passed your broken English deathshadow...
I think they are distributing a "modified" GPL executable.. inside the devices firmware..
This court case will be interesting though, I suspect many companies will be waiting for the final judgement..