Settlement Reached in Verizon GPL Violation Suit

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 17, 2008 @09:30AM from the lifetime-of-clicking-i-agree-on-licenses-brought-to-a-halt dept.

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.'"

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Re:Now that they have the money.. by corsec67 · 2008-03-17 09:39 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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