Monsoon settles with Busybox

A PRESS RELEASE from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) reveals that Monsoon Multimedia and the two principal developers of BusyBox have agreed to settle the GPLv2 copyright licence enforcement lawsuit filed earlier on behalf of the developers by the SFLC.

The announcement reads, in part:

"As a result of the plaintiffs agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit and reinstate Monsoon Multimedia's rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL, Monsoon Multimedia has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Monsoon Multimedia of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid by Monsoon Multimedia to the plaintiffs."

Monsoon uses the BusyBox lightweight set of Unix utilities embedded in its HAVA TV appliances and had initially resisted the BusyBox developers' demand that it honour the terms of the Gnu General Public Licence version 2 (GPLv2) under which BusyBox was distributed. The GPL requires that distributors provide access to the source code of the software to all recipients. After Monsoon ignored them, the developers filed a lawsuit.

We note that Monsoon's rights to distribute BusyBox were not reinstated automatically by coming into compliance with the terms of the GPL, and that the settlement includes a monetary payment by Monsoon to the BusyBox developers for their hassle and costs. µ

L'INQ
Software Freedom Law Center