Productive and Amicable Negotiations Lead to Settlement of Copyright Infringement Case

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia today jointly announced that an agreement has been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox.

Monsoon Multimedia today announced efforts to fully comply with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Monsoon is in settlement negotiations with BusyBox to resolve the matter and intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements.

"...This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC’s) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur.

I've just heard from the Software Freedom Law Center that the BusyBox-Monsoon Multimedia GPL-enforcement litigation has been settled on the following terms:

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.

A settlement has been reached in the case filed last month against Monsoon Multimedia by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of two BusyBox developers.

What do Verizon, Cisco Systems, Bell Microproducts, Super Micro Computer, Monsoon Multimedia, Xterasys Corp, High-Gain Antennas and Extreme Networks have in common? All of these companies were sued by the FSF or SFLC for open source software license violations.

Linux developer Matthew Garrett leads 6 other Linux copyright holders to Software Freedom Conservancy's free software license compliance program: "I'm glad to put my copyrights forward for this new initiative, and welcome any Linux kernel copyright holders who wish to join us to reach out to Conservancy via compliance@sfconservancy.org."

"In this month's update, the FSF tries to block a patent-encumbered standard from slipping through the IETF, the FSF Europe reports on the latest court decisions in the Microsoft case, and the FSF India meets with their government to coordinate the promotion of free software.