“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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