Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/03/more-gpl-success.html

LWN is reporting a
GPL
enforcement story that I learned about during last week while at
GUADEC (excellent conference, BTW,
blog post on that later this week). I wasn’t sure if it was really of
interest to everyone, but since it’s hit the press, I figured I’d write
a brief post to mention it.

As many probably know, I’m president of
the Software Freedom
Conservancy, which is the non-profit organizational home of the
BusyBox project. As part of my role at
Conservancy, I help BusyBox in its GPL enforcement efforts.
Specifically and currently,
Conservancy is in litigation against a number of defendants who have
violated the GPL and were initially unresponsive to Conservancy’s
attempts to bring them into compliance with the terms of the
license.

A few months ago, one of those defendants, Westinghouse Digital
Electronics, LLC, stopped responding to issues regarding the lawsuit.
On Conservancy’s behalf, SFLC asked the judge to issue a default
judgment against them. A “default” means what it looks
like: Conservancy asked to “win by default” since
Westinghouse stopped showing up. And, last
week, Conservancy
was granted a default judgment against Westinghouse, which included
an injunction to stop their GPL-non-compliant distributions of
BusyBox.

“Injunctive Relief”, as the lawyers call it, is a really
important thing for GPL enforcement. Obviously our primary goal is full
compliance with the GPL, which means giving the complete and
corresponding source code (C&CS, as I tend to abbreviate it) to all
those who received binary distributions of the software. Unfortunately,
in some cases (for example, when a company simply won’t cooperate in the
process despite many efforts to convince them to do so), the only option
is to stop further distribution of the violating software. As many
parts of the GPL itself point out, it’s better to not have software
distributed at all, if it’s only being distributed as (de facto)
proprietary software.

I’m really glad that a judge has agreed that the GPL is important
enough a license to warrant an injunction on out-of-compliance
distribution. This is a major step forward in GPL enforcement in the
USA. (Please note
that Harald Welte had
past similar successes in Germany, and deserves credit and kudos for
getting this done the first time in the world. This success follows in
his footsteps.)