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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.'"
And people say you can't make money by giving your software away.
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
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.
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!
How does source code horde?
I have this image of millions of angry lines of code rampaging across the steppings, raping and pillaging peaceful programs, stealing their output and burning their execution platforms.
Oh, right. You meant "hoarding the source code". Sorry, my bad.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"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...
I have this image of millions of angry lines of code rampaging across the steppings, raping and pillaging peaceful programs, stealing their output and burning their execution platforms.
Thats odd. Thats exactly what it says on the Windows ME warranty disclaimer.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why do you need a precedent? Especially in the case of the V2.0 of the GPL, it's solidly based
:-D ).
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...
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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.