BusyBox

Section: Manager's overview >> Software licenses

One major case - which is still underway at time of writing - has been brought concerning BusyBox embedded Linux by the Software Freedom Law Centre and Erik Andersen (the original author) in the New York District Court. The defendants in the legal action include sixteen large consumer electronics corporations.

These companies have been accused of incorporating code from BusyBox into their proprietary systems (HDTVs, PDAs etc), against the terms of the licence agreement. BusyBox was released by Erik Andersen in 1999 under the GNU General Public Licence Version 2.

The companies are accused of breaking Section 2b of the license:

"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

They are also accused of breaking Section 3 by not including the full source code along with the executable. The plaintiff - Mr Andersen - is seeking to stop the copyright infringement and is also claiming for damages and court costs. ( softwarefreedom.org).

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