Major manufacturers and retailers may violated Linux license

In case you did not know, Linux is a common component in many appliances and and consumer electronics devices. Manufacturers lover a Linux stack called Busybox because it’s developer friendly and free.  Apparently they don’t love the fact that Busybox’s license requires distribution the devices source code to buyers and the general public. A new lawsuit may help change this bad behavior.

New York, NY, December 14, 2009//Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among the 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed today in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

The SFLC is a non-profit law firm established in 2005 to provide pro-bono legal services to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers. The suit was filed on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy), the non-profit corporate home of the popular software application BusyBox and many other FOSS projects, and Erik Andersen, one of the program’s principal developers and copyright holders.

The suit charges each of the defendants with selling products containing BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). (SoftwareFreedom.org)

How does this affect us? First, its a reminder that you are free to use and modify Open Source software as you wish. However, if you distribute a modified version, your modifications become Open Source as well. Second, with more source code being distributed for more devices, they become instantly hackable. Even if you’re not technically inclined, open firmware means you’re more likely to find many distributions of modified firmware in the public domain. That means we’ll have more freedom to customize and personalize the gadgets in out lives.