RSSFiOS routers at center of latest GPL lawsuit
By Ed Oswald | Published December 7, 2007, 2:36 PM
The Software Freedom Law Center has sued Verizon on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, saying the routers for its high-speed service infringe on the General Public License.
UPDATED The group is asking for an injunction preventing the sale of the Actiontec MI424WR wireless router, as well as unspecified damages and court costs.
BusyBox is a set of utilities that are included in embedded systems using the UNIX operating system. Since these services fall under the GPLv2, there are certain policies which licensees are required to follow.
One of these is the requirement that any applications based on GPL software must make their source code available. Like the MPAA case reported earlier this week, Verizon has failed to make this available.
SFLC says that it had attempted to contact Verizon to avoid the suit, but the communications company failed to respond. Thus the group filed suit, its fourth on BusyBox alone.
Other companies that have been the target of the SFLC over the utility suite include Monsoon Multimedia, High-Gain Antennas, and Xterasys Corporation. Monsoon settled out of court in October of this year.
"Because Verizon chose not to respond to our concerns, we had no choice but to file a lawsuit to ensure that they comply with the GPL," SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher said in a statement.
Verizon told BetaNews late Friday that it had not yet seen the suit, and was unable to comment on its merits.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you can make money releasing your software with the GPL!
M$? Nah, Bu$yBox, ROTFLMAO!
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|Verizon does need to release the source code.
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|BMW does need to give me a free M3.
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|By Rynet
"How can you sue with GPLv2 software? If that company makes money off this then wth? They do not own GPL they do not own UNIX. They cannot sue for unspecified damages besides court fees."
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Obviously you are not a lawyer and/or have no working knowledge of the law.
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|How can you sue with GPLv2 software? If that company makes money off this then wth? They do not own GPL they do not own UNIX. They cannot sue for unspecified damages besides court fees.
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|It'll be interesting to see how this plays out... I've not seen anything from Verizon on the modifications they made to their custom MI424WR firmware, but ActionTec has the busybox portion available at http://opensource.actiontec.com/
also, the firmware is based on Jungo OpenRG, and Jungo provides the source code for the gpl components at http://www.jungo.com/openrg/download_gpl.html for a $15 fee "to cover our production and shipping costs"
I don't exactly like the idea of charging for source code when they could just provide it for download... and of course there's no telling how complete it is since they're obviously not going to give the complete SDK source away. At least they're trying to be good?
Whatever, the issue is Verizon's modifications. It's a great router, so I'm hoping that they'll just release the source code. Maybe then I can get WPA2 support on mine...
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|You breaka the GPL, you paya the price. lol
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|No surprise there.. Verizon is yet another corrupt corporation that nickles and dimes it's vendors. Then ontop of that they off-shore most of their jobs to third world sh*t holes for cheaper labor, while the management and executives rake in the dividends.
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|But they do have one good product from what I hear, fiOS.
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