eldavojohn writes "The folks who wrote BusyBox & released it under the GPLv2 are being vindicated by the Software Freedom Law Center again this time, against TWO companies. You may recall BusyBox being discussed here before or the original lawsuit against Monsoon Media and its quick resolution. From the article: 'The plaintiffs are two programmers — Erik Andersen and Rob Landley — who wrote BusyBox, software covered by GPLv2, often used in conjunction with the Linux operating system in embedded devices. The suit was filed against Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas; both companies manufacture wireless communications hardware.' The Wikipedia page for BusyBox reveals how embedded hardware companies are falling into this bad pattern: 'Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1996, the intent of BusyBox was to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy that would be both a rescue disk and an installer for the Debian distribution. It has since then become the de facto standard for embedded Linux devices and Linux distribution installers. Since each Linux executable requires several kilobytes of overhead, having the BusyBox program combine over two hundred programs together can save considerable space.' That sounds exactly what one would desire for a low resources real time system! These companies just have to remember that they need to release the source for GPL'd code (and any modifications to that code) if they release a binary to customers!" Link to Original Source
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