Software Freedom Law Center Files Two More GPL Infringement Lawsuits

November 21, 2007

LinuxDevices.com reports the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed two more GPL infringement lawsuits on behalf of an open source software project. The second-ever GPL lawsuit alleges that Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas failed to honor "source-code transparency," in violation of Busybox's GPLv2 license.

Filed November 19th in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the complaints request injunctions be issued against Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas, respectively, and that damages and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs.

Specifically, the suit claims that the SFLC asked Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas, LLC to distribute BusyBox source code to downstream recipients, but that they have not complied. Refusing to honor "source-code transparency" is a violation of the BusyBox's GPL version 2 license.

The nonprofit SFLC has alleged that the following Xterasys routers and gateways are in violation of the GPL license: the BM-200, WAP257, XA-2611B, MH350, XR-2408GU, XR-3106, XR-4106, and WR-254. High-Gain is being sued over its HGA-8186HP-1 customer-premises equipment (CPE) wireless router.

BusyBox works by combining tiny versions of many common Unix/Linux GNU utilities into a single small executable. It may well be the most popular utility in the world of embedded Linux, due to its ability to provide many of the most popular Unix command line utilities, without adding greatly to the operating system's memory and storage requirements.

Stated Rob Landley, a developer of BusyBox and a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, "We let companies do what they like with BusyBox on their hardware, and what we asked in return was that they let us reproduce what they've done with BusyBox on our hardware," said Rob Landley, a BusyBox developer and plaintuff in the lawsuit. "That's the deal embodied in the GPL."