SFLC Sues 14 Companies For BusyBox GPL Violations 309
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the fourteen-birds-with-one-stone dept.
from the fourteen-birds-with-one-stone dept.
eldavojohn writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a lawsuit accusing fourteen companies, including Best Buy, Samsung and Westinghouse, of violating the GPL in nearly 20 separate products. This is similar to earlier BusyBox GPL suits. The commercial uses of BusyBox must be much more prolific than anyone could have imagined. Having dealt with hundreds of compliance problems and finding an average of one violation per day, the SFLC recommends one thing: be responsive to their requests (they try to settle things in private first) lest you find one of these (PDF) in your inbox."
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure these companies "embrace" open source? sounds to me like they really just raped it...
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
And Microsoft shouldn't sue any of the Mom-n-Pop computer shops for selling boxes with phony Windows license keys, as it would discourage anyone from selling boxes based on commercial / propriatary software.
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can hear upper management screaming now (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can hear upper management screaming now (Score:3, Insightful)
So, err, there's no risk of a lawsuit by stealing someone else's proprietary code? I sincerely beg to differ on that one.
Re:I can hear upper management screaming now (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is still possible without releasing any source code.
The keyword here is "distributing" - even if you don't create a derivative at all.
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for people to use open source software, someone has to write open source software. It does not appear by magic from the "software fairy".
The SFLC's primary purpose is to encourage people to write open source software, not to encourage people to use it. By encouraging people to write OSS, SFLC helps ensure that there is a large body of useful and relevant OSS available for people to use.
People who write OSS under the GPL are motivated by (among other things) the idea of sharing work: The price you pay to use my work is that you have to share any improvements you make, and you have to allow your users to share my work, too.
By bringing forward these lawsuits, the SFLC ensures that the author's sharing requirement is met, thus encouraging the author to make more OSS available.
Re:Works for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Got an e-mail from the SFLC this morning (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what's so galling about these cases; these companies are distributing unmodified BusyBox so complying with GPL shouldn't be that hard and it doesn't even require them to release any of their code. Yet they don't even bother to provide unmodified BusyBox source.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
No the GPL is just somewhere between "actually free" and totally proprietary...
How do you think most commercial vendors would react if you started distributing their code in violation of their terms?
The GPL is a defence mechanism, primarily against vendors who would take open code, perform minor changes to break compatibility and they try to lock people in to proprietary forks. Noone really likes it, it's just a sad fact of life that if you give people too much freedom they will abuse it.
Re:SFLC Sues 14 Companies for Copyright Violations (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot is a community with a lot of different groups and opinions represented.
You can't just take two opinions that have been expressed at various times, declare them incompatible, and pretend that you have scored some kind of point.
There are people here that are for an abolishment of copyright. There are also people here that a big believers in the GPL. This does not mean that there is even one slashdotter out there that have both opinions!
If you find one, you may have a debate, but until then you are just doing the straw man thing.
Re:SFLC Sues 14 Companies for Copyright Violations (Score:4, Insightful)
And I have no idea why they were dumped into one group as if there is no difference in opinion between any of them.
I disagree.
So, when they are all lumped together, there's no problem, but when there is a difference of opinion from within that lump, that's a problem?
It would amount to free software developers giving away their code as charity to proprietary shops, who would then sell it for a profit. Free software developers would get absolutely nothing in return.
As opposed to today, where the exact same thing you are saying would be a bad result is happening now.
Re:Not such a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)