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SFLC Sues 14 Companies For BusyBox GPL Violations
eldavojohn writes "The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a lawsuit accusing fourteen companies, including Best Buy, Samsung and Westinghouse, of violating the GPL in nearly 20 separate products. This is similar to earlier BusyBox GPL suits. The commercial uses of BusyBox must be much more prolific than anyone could have imagined. Having dealt with hundreds of compliance problems and finding an average of one violation per day, the SFLC recommends one thing: be responsive to their requests (they try to settle things in private first) lest you find one of these (PDF) in your inbox."
Unlike the patent trolls and the **AA, at least these guys do it right. You don't find a summons showing up without knowing that one is coming, there's no extortionist tactics, and they're not doing it for profit motive.
Now why in the hell don't we see state/federal laws that require such behavior? I mean, why not have something sane like a law detailing that first the litigant must prove that they spent at least x days/weeks/months trying to negotiate a change in behavior first, and must prove that they had done so in a good faith effort? (that last part is important, as otherwise one could see the likes of the RIAA sending some ungodly demand down, then claiming that they "tried")?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I have to give credit to Sharp. I bought an Aquos 52" TV this past year and they included the GPL statements and a link to obtain busybox on their site. The link wasn't working at first and I emailed them to get the source and the link started working again the next day. Following the rules isn't all that hard to do. I don't see why there would be such a huge problem with companies providing a link.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
What the hell, I have karma to burn: It doesn't sound as nice when I put it that way, does it?
Granted, (before I get 20 responses telling me just how many ways the SFLC is different than the RIAA), I acknowledge that the tactics that the SFLC is using are actually sane and civil. The point remains, however: all the pirate supporters on this website don't like it when you shove their arguments back in their face. If there were no copyright, or if copyright were limited to 2 years, then Linux 2.6.15 would be in the public domain by now and anyone could put it into any product they wanted without giving back to the people that created it.
Wouldn't the use of BusyBox inside a DVD player be for debugging use only? In other words, great for the developer, but useless for the end customer?
In which case - why didn't they simply remove it from the shipping version? They are free to use it as an internal tool, just not ship it with the product. Satisfies everyone - engineers, upper management, and the OSS lawyers.