The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed two more copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The defendants in the lawsuits are Xterasys Corporation and High-Gain Antennas, LLC.

Microsoft violated the General Public License v2 (GPLv2) when it distributed its Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) without providing source code, says the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed two more copyright infringement lawsuits, on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The defendants in this new round of lawsuits are Bell Microproducts, Inc. and Super Micro Computer, Inc.

Almost everyone uses Linux, thanks to its growing popularity in consumer electronics in everything from TVs to DVR (digital video recorders) to DVD recorders to you name it. Some companies, however, think that they can use Linux and open-source software for their products without releasing the source code or, in some cases, paying the creators. Wrong.

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed two more GPL infringement lawsuits on behalf of an open-source software project. The second-ever GPL lawsuit alleges that Xterasys and High-Gan Antennas failed to honor "source-code transparency," in violation of Busybox's GPLv2 license.

The Software Freedom Law Center, provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), today announced that it has settled the GPL violation lawsuit filed on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley against Xterasys Corporation.

You sometimes hear people trying to dismiss the GNU General Public License, the most popular of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, as being unenforceable. While there is a long list of companies that have been alleged to infringe the license, none of these companies seem to agree this license is unenforceable and opt to settle out of court rather than challenge the license.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues.

Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as well as the extent to which they use it.