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Settlement Reached in Verizon GPL Violation Suit
eldavojohn writes "A settlement has been reached in the Verizon GPLv2 violation suit. The now famous BusyBox developers, Erick Andersen and Rob Landley, will receive an undisclosed sum from subcontractor Actiontec Electronics. 'Actiontec supplied Verizon with wireless routers for its FiOS broadband service that use an open source program called BusyBox. BusyBox developers Andersen and Landley in December sued Verizon -- claiming that the usage violated terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License.'"
So..... They basically stuffed a wad of cash down Anderson and Landley's throats and said "Shut up, and go away kids... you bother me." in a W.C. Fields voice impression.
And people say you can't make money by giving your software away.
That was pretty expensive free software
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
. . . that they settled. I would have liked to see a ruling that established a precident for dealing with this kind of violation.
Ah well. I'm sure that there were other details that were equally important in determining the outcome.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
How is this different from a pantent troll? Create a program, GPL it, wait for some company to use it, and sue?
Except in this case the license is *right there* in the code they used. Also, they weren't prevented from writing something functionally similar to BusyBox.
Basically, Patents != Copyrights.
IP is "Imaginary Property" that doesn't actually exist or have any laws on it.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
We can't do bugger all with suppositions.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
First, we have no idea how much this cost and over how many boxes.
Second, the costs for MS and even real times OSs are damn expensive on a per box basis.
Finally, it seems odd that neither company took care of this. For what was required was pretty minor, that is publish the source code.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How is it different from a patent troll? The patent troll doesn't bother with that pesky "create" step.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Looks like this isn't the first time these guys have litigated this. Infringing this software seems to be a habit.
Anyway, I wonder if this is a good thing for PR. If companies point to this to be even more reluctant to adopt F/OSS solutions, and make subcontractors indemnify themselves, and basically make everybody CTheirA even more tightly, it will likely be a bad thing for everybody involved; Open Source Software gets less support from the mainstream, services cost more (because of all that R&D poured into re-inventing this "wheel" thing everybody's talking about), and everybody misses out on the fruits of useful labor that could be shared.
Obviously "letting them get away with it" is not an acceptable option, and I'm very glad to see a settlement suggesting the enforcability of the GPL (even if it isn't precedent-setting or anything), but I just wish that we could have had this victory without possibly raising more fears in the suspender-and-two-belts corporate world. OSS coders need money too, and a lot of it is going to come from folks who use software without directly selling it.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Are you serious? A GPL'd program is labeled as such, with conditions for redistribution. If you don't like the conditions, don't distribute it. Using patented technologies these days is as simple as thinking up something obvious and uncomplicated, without reference to what is patented. Searching for every patented technology before using obvious ideas would be quite costly. It's not like patent trolls say "here's this patented technology, and if you use it without paying royalties, we'll sue you later".
Patent trolls wait for some one to implement an obvious idea and strike. This is some one choosing to distribute a particular piece of software in violation of the license.
How are those similar?
"... And Lord willing .. we will all be back in GPL3 .. the search for more money." (Apologies to Mel Brook's Space Balls).
Using patented technologies these days is as simple as thinking up something obvious and uncomplicated, without reference to what is patented.
To be fair, the whole problem with patent trolling is that this isn't all that simple any more. Obvious and uncomplicated things get patented with alarming frequency.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Umm...
It's nothing like a patent troll. They provided software and said you could use it in your product if you follow a simple set of rules. The people making the product didn't follow the rules, and didn't bother to correct this till they were sued.
A patent troll doesn't provide squat. They just wait for someone to come up with an idea the troll might have already patented and then attempts to extort that person after they've managed to implement the idea and make it profitable.
This isn't even apples and oranges. It's apples and school bus yellow race cars.
If they settled, that probably is somewhat of an indication that the GPL might hold up in court, at least in this case. No one knows how much the settlement was, but if it was more than the cost to take the case to court, that would be a pretty clear indication that they didn't want to mess with this.
The difference is that these people actually put a lot of time and thought into *creating* something. They deserve all kinds of protection by law. A patent troll merely patents some obvious idea and sits there, but never creates anything.
Huge difference.
Actually the software was free. The expensive part was hording the source code. So, the correct statement is "That was pretty expensive hording."
I don't quite know what you mean. The court enforced the GPL license as it is written, and GPL is easily available. It isn't like Verizon couldn't see that the code was under the GPL, or what the GPL says.
If a company can't have someone look over a license to see if they want to accept it, then they probably shouldn't be using GPLd code.
Or do companies just blindly accept any sort of contract you send their way?
This also means that if a company wants to release code under the GPL, there is some precedent for enforcing it against someone else that uses the code without releasing their changes.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
LOLOL
If only we knew how much so that we could decide if it was worth it.
By "worth it", I'll assume you mean not whether it was worth the time and trouble to write GPL software, but rather, "the market value of the software".
The agreement by Verizon to pay an "undisclosed sum" to the developers can be fairly characterised as a penalty against Verizon, a personal financial bonus to the developers, and, with respect to letter and spirit of GPL, a moral bonus for everyone else. What's BusyBox worth? If we knew what Verizon paid for their Actiontec contract, we could make some educated guesses but then, it sort of misses the point.
Reading the article, I'm not sure the writer even knows what BusyBox is. That said, the fact that the lawsuit is in the news and is now settled, makes me pleased as punch. At the very least, I'll have less explaining to do when I walk in someone's door with a few Soekris boxes under my arm.
You've managed to create a car analogy without really creating a car analogy. This is almost as good as recursion.
Congrats!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Just to set the record straight for the younger guys who might not know, BusyBox was first developed by Bruce Perens and is in use in an amazing variety of products out there now. (I'm just a friend who read up on it before)
Turns out it was more worth it to Verizon to pay the authors to keep their (Verizon's) software closed instead of distributing it under the terms of the GPL. That's just business.
So, didja get paid for those too?
It's way different. GPL code ALWAYS has the notification of the license and terms of use as part the code/comments. People who pick up the code and use it have no excuse for not noticing that it was GPL'd. With patents, you generally/often have no idea if someone has a patent on what you think is your own original work.
Very simple. A patent troll wants to milk the "infringers" for all the money they've got. With GPL violations, there's a very simple and socially beneficial way to resolve the dispute: release the source code. As Eben Moglen likes to point out, the first thing he always tells GPL violators is "we don't want money". It is always a shame when the violators refuse to comply up to the point where they have to be forced by the court to pay.
"must pay an undisclosed sum to developers Erick Andersen and Rob Landley."
Now this pisses me off. Anderson you AIN'T GOT FULL COPYRIGHT OF BUSYBOX. I handled it for 2 years prior to you and Perens wrote the original. (And might I add I warned you about improperly changing copyright notices back then.)
Did you even bother to contact Perens on this?
If you sued to get them to abide by the GPL, that's one thing. But a personal payout without consideration for the other developers involved? Hell no...
How is this different from a pantent troll?
You can use busybox on the same hardware with proprietary software without getting sued or having to pay royalties. It's the same as having proprietary software running on a Linux box even though Linux kernel is GPLed.
Follow a few simple rules. The main ones are don't link to busybox(or any other GPLed software) and you must offer the source of busybox to people you distribute that binary to.
Busybox is an executable. Your program may be an executable. Simply because they exist on the same filesystem doesn't make your software GPL'ed. It's a 'mere aggregation'. I've a programmer who viewed the GPL as a threat to the point he wouldn't write Linux software. After I explained a few things to him he started using it as a tool.
People who don't read the GPL before using it gives the GPL a bad name.
Worth the time and effort to fight. Not everyone can take the moral high ground and spend time on losing money. I hope they made out better than ok.
Yes, of course, way to go GPLv2
How is this different from a pantent troll? Create a program, GPL it, wait for some company to use it, and sue?
Well, the biggest difference is that it is 100% UNLIKE a patent troll because it is a COPYRIGHT case, not a patent case. But lets look at this from a more philosophical perspective.
Patent trolls don't create any new intellectual property. Almost the entire energy of a patent troll business like Acacia is to buy up obscure patents, often of questionable validity, for ideas that are already widely implemented. Once the patent is bought they then go out and sue the pants of the people who actually did the real "creating". In this case, the authors of Busybox worked hard and have dedicated countless hours of time supporting and improving their creation and have been courteous enough to offer their creation under very generous terms. Instead of a monetary obligation in return for the right to use Busybox, they instead asked that any derivative works or redistributions require the obligation of source code redistribution.
Patent trolls rely on deception and hidden information as their business model. They look for "hidden treasures" where a little known patent could potentially be broadly applied across a huge number of implementations developed by unsuspecting inventors. Busybox is most definitely NOT obscure, and its terms-of-use are most definitely VERY well known and even more easily understood than most EULAs used in the industry. The authors of Busybox and the SFLC did nothing at all to deceive anyone or trick them into using the software improperly.
This is basically an example of why intellectual property rights are so important. The Free software community needs to have the same tools (weapons) at their disposal to defend the freedom of their software as the "mafIAA" wield to try to restrict and control information.
How is this different from a pantent troll?
It is different from a patent troll in much the same way a football is different from space rocket - by having no properties in common!
May we live long and die out
except for the --lawsuit parameter =)
Well, they're both solid shells within which is contained compressed air.
Much like a patent troll.
Yes, I did mean "hoarding". That make makes four mistakes I've made.
Is there a shiny new car in your garage? You both sooo deserve it, I must say.
If you didn't get one or don't plan to, at least a T-shirt that says 'We settled with Verizon and all I got was (you know the rest).'
Or if you bought a six pack of imported beer and gave the rest to FOSS. We'd like to hear some good news from either one of you.
So we could all point and say, Hey this guy, he
1. coded serious software
2. GPLicensed it
3. sued the pants off GPL violators
4. Profit!
5. Get a. car b. T-shirt c. sixpack d. More RAM
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The first Atlas ICBMs, later used in the Gemini manned space program, had to be pressurized to provide structural rigidity, kind of like a football.
it's a good thing a settlement was reached. people should respect software licenses, and the GPL is definitely no exception to that rule.
With a redundant array of inefficient developers, AKA Extreme Programming.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I used to work for AEI. Back in the day there was another product sold by Qwest and others that also ran Busybox. We were found to be on the Wall of Shame. At that time there were some of us who cared about FOSS and we were ashamed of this. Unfortunately AEI is not a company who gives a shit about its pissant workers. These workers are people the suits jokingly call "monkeys" on phone calls with each other and the suits from the other companies they dealt with such as Qwest, Verizon, etc.. "You want that by Tuesday? OK, we'll just have the monkeys work the weekend." Those underlings who cared about linux cried out about licensing and getting in good with the FOSS community went unheard. AEI's actions seemed hypocritical because we used FOSS so much. Almost the entire dev team used Linux. We used Linux to route our networks, run test servers, etc.. (That being said, we also used an amazing amount of expensive pirated software like Windows Server 2000/2003, NetIQ Chariot, etc., but I digress...) One of us who was high enough up in the company took it upon himself to bring the issue forward and managed to get us off The Wall of Shame by posting source-code on our site. We thought of this as a big win. We thought maybe this suit driven company with its BMW 7's out front and its sweatshop monkeys in the back of 760 N Mary might actually be turning over a new leaf. No, that's not the case. One small win. Then later, the man who had gotten us off The Wall of Shame left the company. It was only a matter of time before we got back up on that wall, nobody else knew the FOSS culture and cared enough, let alone had a voice in that company. I'm glad AEI lost that battle. That settlement money might not be going to all their employees who go year after year without even getting a raise or a Christmas bonus, but at least it's not in the grubby hands of Dean and the rest of the suits.
How about its the difference between getting hit in the head with a brick and getting hit with a shovel. A brick is nothing like a shovel but they are both bad for your head.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is different from a patent troll in much the same way a football is different from space rocket - by having no properties in common!
Now I object to that. It simply isn't true. They have lots in common
The rocket is made of matter, and the football team is made of matter.
The rocket has no brains and neither does the football team.
The rocket overcomes the enemy (gravity) by means of brute force and so does the football team.
The rocket going up may generate interest among females, and unlike the typical slashdotter so will the football team.
The rocket is dangerous and must be treated with respect to avoid injury. Likewise the football team.
The rocket will launch you into the straosphere, and so will the football team if you're not careful.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It is exactly the same as the SCO business model, except that these guys actually *do* own the copyright.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
related to finally allowing Stallman to permanently move to Cuba.
As far as I can see it those two now have 2 options:
(1) Deduct their costs (and time!) from the profit and donate the rest to a worthy cause. That would be stylish, and alleviate a lot of problems
(2) Hang on to the cash and thus start a cat fight amongst contributors for the loot. If I were Ballmer and Gates I'd love to see that happening, and I'd do anything -including but not limted to fake board postings- to keep that fire going because it'll keep the EU, Vista and OOXML problems nicely out of the headlines.
It'll be interested to see what happens.
Insert
Can you prove this?
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Actually, reality is a subset of the set you identified. Unfortunately, mass delusions share precisely the same property.
For that matter so do social conventions, like social status, wealth, property, and law. These things have a kind of belief bootstrapped existence; the law is the law precisely because people agree that is so. A rational person doesn't have to accept these these things as valid, only that others believe them to be so.
It can be argued, as Thoreau did, that "a person more right than his neighbors is a majority of one."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
People don't have to prove their innocence when accused of wrong-doing, at least not in the US Courts (Gitmo is apparently another, very disturbing, matter).
Verizon doesn't need to prove their innocence. I am no lawyer, but it seems pretty clear and reasonable to me that if you buy a part from someone and that someone else violated the law in the production and/or sale of the part, then that other party should be the one held accountable for the violation. The only time I'd allow for an exception to that is if you can show that the first party knew (or reasonably should have known) that there was a violation, and they were conspiring with the other party to violate the law. And you would have to prove such a conspiracy, I would think.
www.engin.com.au wont provide the firmware which is busy box upon request because they apparently ship there netgear units with a licenses/agreement that overrides the GPL??? and have refused to supply and modified busybox firmware even tho it was pointed out to them over the phone they were in clear violation of the gpl?
Yes, that was the exact point; you are very likely to be using patented technologies even if your design is something obvious. You don't have to read a single patent to easily come up with many ideas which are already patented. Considering that damages are triple if you do it knowingly, it's actually better to remain ignorant of what is patented.