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:2007-07-14
Member since:2007-02-17
Monsoon DIDN'T distribute the code to their customers so the only way for them to comply was to make it available for download.
Not at all.
Firstly, the GPL does not require you to distribute the code to all your customers ... what it actually requires is that you make the source code available to anyone who asks for it (customers or not).
All that was required of Monsoon is to have provided the source code to the people who did ask for it.
Monsoon could have done that by making it available for download from a website, but just as easily Monsoon could have posted a CD with the source on it back to the few people who asked for it.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
From my understanding, the GPL doesn't actually require you to make your source/changes public. They do require only to make your source/changes available to the people you're distributing the GPL-licensed product to upon request. Granted, any one of those people is then free to post the source themselves anywhere they want, but the obligation isn't on the distributor of the source to do so.
So in this case, Monsoon isn't necessarily obligated to make the source available on the website, but should be prepared to provide the source to any customer purchasing the infringing product at the customer's request.
I suspect many commercial products using GPL-protected code probably do so under the assumption that people won't actually care enough to request the code, unless they've done something mind-bendingly cool with it. Monsoon was probably under this assumption, so this should serve as a lesson to other manufacturers to be prepared to make the code available upon request, instead of hoping that no one will ask, or that they'll be willing to walk away empty handed.