For decades, almost no one challenged the General Public License in legal matters. In fact, no one has even dared to try to break it in court. That record remains unsullied as the biggest company to date--Verizon--that had been accused of a GPL violation opted to settle out of court.
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sepreece
16 years 4 weeks 4 days 14 hours ago
Biggest how?
There's nothing about this case that makes the settlement "bigger" than the previous SFLC/BusyBox cases.
This is one of a bunch of articles about these cases that assume that, for some unspecified reason, the companies being sued WANT to break the license. Most manufacturers are perfectly happy to abide by the terms of licenses and do so routinely. They sometimes get things wrong on FLOSS license because those licenses are different from what they usually deal with, but generally have do desire to go to court to fight a pointless battle about whether to post source code that is just the same source code they got from the developer.
Note, too, that the author of this item states that Verizon was involved in the settlement, which is not what the SFLC announcement said. The SFLC spoke only of Actiontec taking actions to resolve the matter. That seems like a victory for companies that, like Verizon, are simply passing through software embedded in devices made by other companies.