Best Buy, Samsung, Others Hit With GPL Lawsuit

By Geoff Duncan Updated December 15, 2009

Samsung Luxia 8500 Series LED LCD HDTV

The Freedom Law Center has filed suit against consumer electronics Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and eleven other consumer electronics companies for selling products containing BusyBox, a widely used Linux utility library that’s available for use under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. BusyBox has a long, solid history for providing functionality to consumer electronics and other devices using embedded Linux operating systems, and under the terms of the GPL anyone can use, modify, and distribute BusyBox for free as long as they distribute the source code to customers, with any of their changes. The Software Freedom Law Center alleges that more than 20 products from these 14 manufacturers have failed to meet their obligations under the GPL: they’re including BusyBox, but they arent’ abiding my the minimal requirements of the GPL to distribute source code.

“We try very hard to resolve these types of issues privately with companies, as we always prefer cooperation,” said SFLC counsel Aaron Williamson, in a statement. “We brought this suit as a last resort after each of these defendants ignored us or failed to meaningfully respond to our requests that they release the source code”.

The new suit isn’t the first time major companies have been taken to court for rolling BusyBox into their products without distributing source code: previous defendants include Monsoon, Xterasys, Cisco, and Verizon. All those cases have been settled, with the companies agreeing to distribute source code.

The 14 companies named in the lawsuit are Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, JVC, Western Digital, Bosch, Phoebe Micro, Humax, Comtrend, Dobbs-Stanford, Versa Technology, Zyxel, Astac, and GCI Technologies. Nearly 20 products are alleged to contain BusyBox in violation of the GPL license, including Best Buy’s Insignia Blu-ray DVD Player, Westinghouse’s 52-inch LCD TV, and Samsung HDTVs.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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