High Gain, BusyBox kiss and make up

CHALK UP another win for the GPL. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and High Gain Antennas announced on March 6 that High Gain agreed to comply with the GNU General Public Licence version 2 (GPLv2) and therefore the SFLC agreed to dismiss its lawsuit on behalf of the developers of BusyBox.

High Gain uses the BusyBox suite of lightweight Unix utilities in its wi-fi devices, but it had not been complying with the GPL licencing requirement to make its modified BusyBox source code available to its customers. After High Gain failed to respond to a request from the BusyBox developers that it comply with the GPL, the SFLC filed a lawsuit on their behalf seeking compliance.

As results of the settlement, High Gain will publish its modified BusyBox source code and appoint an open source compliance officer to ensure that the company won't violate the GPL again. BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley reportedly also received a financial settlement.

Representatives from both sides said they were pleased to have settled the matter amicably without unnecessary and expensive litigation. µ

L'Inq
Linux Watch