What was being billed as the first legal test of the GPL licence in court is unlikely to go before a judge.

According to Linux Watch, the case against Monsoon Multimedia has been settled out of court. The company has admitted that it violated the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2), and said it will release its modified BusyBox code in full compliance with the license.

Monsoon Multimedia is negotiating with the BusyBox project to resolve the matter and said in a statement that it will fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. It will make its modified BusyBox source code publicly available on on its website in the coming weeks.

While this is a victory for BusyBox, many observers were hoping that it would give GPL 2 a chance to prove itself in court and thus make any future enforcement easier.

BusyBox is used in virtually all Linux-based devices and combines tiny versions of many common Unix/Linux utilities into a single small executable.

More here.