Weirdie Beardies in court
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.