How to avoid modern day public GPL floggings

"This week, the Software Freedom Law Center, an organization related to the Free Software Foundation and affiliated with Free Software advocate and attorney Eben Moglen, filed a lawsuit against 14 companies on behalf of Erik Anderson, the author of BusyBox, a popular GPLv2-licensed command interpreter used in the development of embedded Linux devices.

"Why are these firms being sued? In short, they violated the terms of the GPLv2 license, which states implicitly that if you use GPLv2 software in any product, be it software or hardware, then you have to publish the source, as well as any modifications to that source, which is where the "Copyleft" angle of Free Software comes into play.

"Sounds simple, really. Publish the source — which is basically just a copy of the source you downloaded from whatever project that used it — along with the changes."

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