In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang.

As the SCO lawsuit falls deeper into oblivion, it is worth relating this to existing new lawsuits (TomTom and Melco, both settled)

The Software Freedom Law Center, provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), today announced that it has settled the GPL violation lawsuit filed on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against Xterasys Corporation.

Rosetta Stone's trademark lawsuit against a competitor brought to mind the simmering issue of trademark violations in open source. One of the opportunities and challenges in open source is that presumably anyone can be an expert in Project X, Y, or Z. Because of this dispersed expertise, the opportunity to run afoul of trademark violations is rife.

LAST WEEK was the last time we wrote about the T3 lawsuit, having pointed out that it is part of an innovative pattern. Over at Groklaw, in relation to the T3 lawsuit, Pamela Jones wrote: "Microsoft rivals end up defendants in litigation with Microsoft showing up somewhere in the background? How could that ever happen? Kidding...

Contrary to yesterday's report, the lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) in its distribution of BusyBox may not be headed for a quick settlement. Nor will the settlement necessarily be out-of-court.

Free Software Foundation Europe's Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org have just formed a partnership that has released a guide to reporting and fixing license violations.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon Communications, Inc. on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under GPL version 2.

Now that the recent lawsuit against Verizon (NYSE: VZ) by a couple of open source developers has been settled, it's become clear -- as some people suspected -- that the real offender here wasn't Verizon per se but a subcontractor, Actiontec.