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The GPL gets its day in court

The US finally has received its first lawsuit over the General Public License (GPL).

Developers behind the BusyBox open source project have filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for alleged violations of the open source license.

Monsoon is refusing to publish the source code for BusyBox tools that they ship with their consumer devices, even though help desk operators have allegedly admitted to using the code.

Amazingly, this is actually the very first time that developers are asking the courts to enforce the GPL. That is amazing because several parties (SCO and some within Microsoft) will still argue that the GPL is illegal and therefore can't be enforced. A court ruling would establish a valuable precedent.

Monsoon however seemed genuinely surprised when we called them for comment, claiming they hadn't seen the complaint and weren't aware of any problems. It is therefore plausible that the firm will quickly release the source code and settle the suite.

For that matter, Europe is years ahead of the US in its legal pursuit of GPL violators – something that can probably be credited to the limited costs of a legal battle in the old world. Back in 2006 D-Link was whipped into submission by the German courts, after the maker of networking gear had unsuccessfully argued that the license wasn't a legally binding document.

September 21, 2007 at 12:37 AM | Permalink

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