Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2013/06/26/fantec.html

I’d like to congratulate Harald Welte on yet another great decision in the
Berlin court, this time regarding a long-known GPL violator called Fantec.
There are so many violations of this nature that are of course so
trivially easy to find; it’s often tough to pick which one to take action
on. Harald has done a great job being selective to make good examples of
violators.

Just as a bit of history, I first documented and confirmed the Fantec
violation in January 2009, based
on this
email sent to the BusyBox mailing list. I discovered that the product
didn’t seem to be regularly on sale in the USA, so it wasn’t ultimately
part of the lawsuit that Conservancy and Erik Andersen filed in late
2009.

However, since Fantec products were on sale mostly in Germany, it was a
great case for Harald to pursue. I’m not surprised in the least that even three
years after I confirmed the
violation, gpl-violations.org
found Fantec still out of compliance and was able to take action at
that point. It’s not surprising either that it took an entire year
thereafter to get it resolved. My reaction to that was actually: Darn,
that Berlin Court acts fast compared to Courts in the USA. 🙂