Freeloaders Beware
by T. Colin Dodd
Free Software Group Files Copyright Lawsuits - Yahoo! News
The Software Freedom Law Center, an organization focused on protecting open-source and free software, has filed copyright lawsuits against two U.S. companies, alleging that they are redistributing software in violation of the GNU GPL (General Public License).
The SFLC filed lawsuits Monday on behalf of the developers of BusyBox against High-Gain Antennas of Parker, Colorado, and Xterasys of City of Industry, California. The lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, allege that the companies are distributing BusyBox illegally, without meeting the GPL requirement of providing access to the source code of their implementation.
BusyBox, available since November 1999, is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems licensed under GPL version 2. The two companies are distributing “BusyBox, or a modified version of BusyBox that is substantially similar to BusyBox,” the lawsuits allege. The lawsuits ask the court to give the BusyBox developers the profits from that software, plus other damages.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:06 am
My thumb’s up. The GPL doesn’t mean anything if nobody defends it. It’s not as if compliance were expensive. You just have to let your customers know that they can get a copy of the source from, for example, your Web site.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:52 am
It is quite ironic that you highlight both the BSA and the SFLC actions at the same time. Filing suit right before Thanksgiving is classic jerk litigation, and if the High-Gain CEO is to be believed, unnecessary. It sounds like both organizations are bullying small businesses, who are ill-equipped to deal with the threat of scorched-earth litigation.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:49 am
It’s only ironic if you believe that open source companies don’t respect intellectual property laws.
When there are abuses, or copyright laws are used for other purposes (such as quashing dissent in Russia), expect this blog to raise a stink. If it doesn’t encourage the growth of the arts and sciences, expect us to say so.
But when someone benefits from the open source model, and then fails to pass their innovations on, they get what they deserve.
Rules are rules.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:34 am
I think this article is sorely mistitled!
It says “Freeloaders Beware”. Free Software advocates are accustomed to being called names like this (we use and advocate software we and others don’t have to pay money for), so we initially mistakenly think this headline is warning *us* to beware.
It turns out that’s just not the headline’s intent. When they say “freeloaders” they mean COMMERCIAL interests who wish to exploit OUR software development efforts without playing by our rules of open source availability.
Whew! Someone ELSE is being called a freeloader! And it’s US they must beware! I can dig that.