Sighs of relief all round
vnunet.com, 25 Sep 2007
Monsoon Multimedia, which was being sued by the Software Freedom Law Center for violating the terms of the General Public Licence version 2 (GPL2), has settled out of court.
The company had used source code from the BusyBox application in its products, but had failed to publish the modified code under the terms of GPL2.
The impending case caused excitement and more than a little trepidation in the open source community because the GPL2 has never been tested in a US court.
"Since we intend to, and always intended to, comply with all open source software licence requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved," said Graham Radstone, chairman of Monsoon Multimedia.
The company will now enter into discussions with the Software Freedom Law Center, and has stated that it will publish source code on its website in the next few weeks to comply with the terms of the GPL2.
The BusyBox software was developed by open source activist Bruce Perens and is used in a variety of Linux devices. It allows coders to access over 200 utilities without incurring a lot of heavy coding.
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