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Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Lawsuit filed over alleged GPL misuse

September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Lawsuit filed over alleged GPL misuse

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.

Posted by Paul Krill on September 20, 2007 03:40 PM


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