Developers who have written code under the open source GPL license are suing more than 14 electronics companies for nicking their code.

Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center.

At the centre of the row is the software application BusyBox which was issued under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It replaces most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils and have fewer options but manage to provide the same functionality. All good stuff for a small or embedded system.

Best Buy; Samsung; Westinghouse; JVC; Western Digital; Robert Bosch; Phoebe Micro; Humax USA; Comtrend; Dobbs-Stanford; Versa Technology; Zyxel Communications; Astak; GCI Technologies, have all been named and shamed in the court case.