Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Lawsuit filed over alleged GPL misuse

news
Sep 20, 20071 min

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced Thursday it has filed the “first-ever” U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients.

The two clients are principal developers of BusyBox, a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems. It is open source software licensed under GPL version 2. The suit was filed against Monsoon Multimedia, which SFLC said acknowledges use of BusyBox in its products but has not provided recipients with access to underlying code as required by the GPL.

Monsoon could not be reached for comment on Thursday. The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Federal District Court on Wednesday, SFLC said. The complaint seeks an injunction against Monsoon and requests damages and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs.

A copy of the complaint can be found here.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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