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.'"

Comments

Re:Now that they have the money..

[Chyeld]

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.

Re:I'm a little disappointed . . .

[Svartalf]

Why do you need a precedent? Especially in the case of the V2.0 of the GPL, it's solidly based
in current Copyright law. It's a derivative works license. The royalty owed for the derivative work
you produce from the original protected work is to allow YOUR derivations to be available under the
same license and to provide an offer of the source code for any derivatives or mere copies of the
protected work.

Don't comply with the royalty arrangement, the agreement is invalidated. If you're not operating
under an agreement with the original works providers (in toto) you're guilty of the act of Infringement,
which is actionable just as if you'd illegally duplicated thousands upon thousands of Brittney's latest
album (though why anyone in their right mind would want to DO that is beyond me... :-D ).

And, that is what you keep seeing here. People caught with their hand in the cookie jar, breaking
Copyright law and capitulating instead of facing the much worse penalties which are typically involved
with such a breach of law.

You don't NEED the GPL to be "validated", each settlement of this scope and scale (especially THIS one,
if you think long and hard about it...)- have already DONE so.