BusyBox Claims Another Victory
The principal developers of BusyBox — Erik Andersen and Rob Landley — have quickly become famous within the Open Source community for the bevy of lawsuits filed on their behalf by the Software Freedom Law Center. Now they're back in the news with the settlement of another GPL action.
The first of the suits, against Monsoon Media — the first-ever GPL infringement lawsuit — was settled out of court at the end of October. A little less than a month later, they filed two new suits, including one against Xterasys Corp, which has now been settled for an undisclosed sum. Xterasys has also pledged to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer, and will refrain from distributing BusyBox until the SFLC certifies that the source code has been made available.
This brings the tally for BusyBox — and the SFLC — to 2-0, and bolsters the likelihood that the two remaining lawsuits, including one filed last week against Verizon, will also be settled quickly.