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First US GPL Lawsuit Heads For Quick Settlement
DeviceGuru writes to tell us that the first lawsuit centered around the GPL seems to have been quickly resolved outside of the courtroom. Monsoon Multimedia was quick to admit that they had violated the GPLv2 in their modified BusyBox code and will soon be releasing the source to come into full compliance with the license.
The interesting thing is that once they start talking to lawyers, I think they are informed of just how screwed they are.
I mean, if they defeat the GPL, then they couldn't use the software in the first place, if they defend the GPL, then they need to conform to it.
Either way, the whole GPL suits are so full of pitfalls and dangers to those abusing the code that they really don't have a chance, and any good lawyer should be telling them that.
There was another suit awhile ago with CherryOS vs PearPC, that looked to be pretty hefty, but before anything could be done, they dumped the product entirely. Sometimes, if something isn't worth that much... it's just not worth keeping around.
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While it's good that Monsoon's finally agreed to uphold the GPL agreement I was rather hoping that they'd hold out, if only to establish precedent for future actions.
I guess. Is a precedent really necessary? I mean the "GPL hasn't been tested in court -- it might be an invalid license!" makes for great anti-GPL FUD, but when you get down to it there is no reason to believe the GPL would be invalid. There are thousands of licenses out there that have never been tried in court, and with most of them there would be no point.
This may be the first GPL lawsuit, but it is hardly the first GPL-related incident with lawyers involved. The fact is that most companies cave immediately when faced with the facts of their GPL violations. Before now nobody has even wanted it to get to the point of a lawsuit being filed, much less letting the facts be tried by a jury. I think it's safe to say that most of these companies' legal departments regard the GPL as a sound license, and getting it ruled invalid as unlikely (and detrimental, since without the GPL they would have no license to use the code at all).
The closest we've come to a company actually fighting the GPL in a court of law was SCO who claimed it was unconstitutional of all things. Nobody else seems to be crazy enough to want to fight the GPL at all.
So a precedent would be nice simply for being able to say "the GPL has been tested in court and was ruled to be a valid license" to silence the FUDmeisters, but practically speaking it's not necessary to protect GPLed code.
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Indeed. This company was also informed months ago by a user that had requested the code, unfortunately with no result. After discussing the GPL issues, Monsoon's rep basically started accusing the users' of illegally decompiling their source (in order to find the violation) and EULA violation etc etc. When told that there was no EULA if you download the source, he basically said "OK, well then we'll stick one in the download, or embed it in the binary so that you can't get around it." This shows that they had very little interest in showing the code, as their attitude towards their GPL obligations at the time was basically "we'll get to it, sometime, and we're not telling you when." Here's a bit of Monsoon's commentary in the forums pre-lawsuit:
Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware - or trying to. How should we handle this?
I had posted the an article up on slashdot at around the time the forum debates were taking place, but unfortunately it never made it past the firehose (and I assume that is has now disappeared since it was rejected). However, the same rep was involved in a debate with me, and was spouting the same BS. His question was "well, what is the opinion of slashdot on breaking the EULA and reverse-engineering our code." I answer that it would really depend on the context, particularly whether the code should have been visible in the first place, and that the use of strings does not qualify as reverse-engineering. He continued to insist that "having reverse-engineered stuff in the past, I know what I'm talking about, so it's just your opinion that strings doesn't count." etc etc
All in all, their attitude - or at least of this rep - has been an offensive defensiveness (aka justify their actions by attacking those of others). I'm hoping that along with having the issues settled he now has an understanding of how the GPL works, but I'm sure he'll probably continue along with the mistaken assumption that his company was never in the wrong, and that this whole thing is the fault of those darn free-software people.