Can the unfulfilled legal obligations in open
source really lead to lawsuits?
There have
been a series of lawsuits related to unfulfilled legal obligations from open
source licenses over the years.Verizon, for example, was sued by the Software Freedom Law Center on
behalf of Busybox, which is a GPL licensed package.The claim was that one of Verizon’s suppliers used a GPL licensed package in Verizon’s FIOS wireless routers, without fulfilling
the re-distribution obligations of GPL.This claim was settled when the supplier agreed to provide
its source code free to the public, appoint a open source compliance officer, and pay the plaintiff an undisclosed sum.
In
recent years there have been similar claims against Cisco, Diebold,
Monsoon
Multimedia, Skype, High Gain Antennas, and Xterasys. While a couple
of these cases are still pending, most of these cases have been
settled.
For all of the cases that settled out of court, the settlement
provisions were in favor of the plaintiff and were similar settlements
to the Verizon case.
In the
cases that were ruled on by the courts, the courts have ruled that the
license obligations are enforceable, ie, the fact that no royalties
exchanged hands does not make the open source license any less
enforceable. The courts have also ruled that companies that did
purchased their commercial software from a third party but then
distributed it to their customers, are still liable if the commercial
software includes open source where the license obligations are not
met. Since these companies often have more financial resources, they
represent an attractive target for these type of lawsuits.
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