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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.
They are going to donate it, right? How is this different from a pantent troll? Create a program, GPL it, wait for some company to use it, and sue?
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. . .
Finally someone found a way to make money off of the GPL. If only we knew how much so that we could decide if it was worth it.
Gregor
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.
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.
"... And Lord willing .. we will all be back in GPL3 .. the search for more money." (Apologies to Mel Brook's Space Balls).
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.
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
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.
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?
"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...
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
step 2. let unwary developer implement it
step 3. profit!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Please remember also that Verizon were told by the Busybox developers what they'd done and Verizon rather than investigate the claims and mitigate them, they decided to deny the allegations.
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
So where's the source code? Settlement is all and good for the developers but this could have all been avoided if they had released the source, and yet even after the lawsuit they don't?
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?