“The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that 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, two principal developers of BusyBox, against Monsoon
Multimedia, Inc. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix
utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source
software licensed under GPL version 2.“One of the conditions of the GPL is that re-distributors of
BusyBox are required to ensure that each downstream recipient is
provided access to the source code of the program. On the company’s
own Web site, Monsoon Multimedia has publicly acknowledged that its
products and firmware contain BusyBox. However, it has not provided
any recipients with access to the underlying source code, as is
required by the GPL…”