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Chill out..Chill out..Posted Sep 24, 2007 15:32 UTC (Mon) by mheily (guest, #27123)In reply to: Monsoon Multimedia gives in on GPL by moxfyre Parent article: Monsoon Multimedia gives in on GPL Wow, did you have too much coffee this morning? This is actually good news as it is the first time the company has acknowledged it's obligations under the GPL and pledged to comply. This Groklaw posting claims that Monsoon was stonewalling until the lawsuit was filed. Now they are finally pledging to take the correct action and respect the license. You are wrong about companies being required to simultaneously release source code with their binaries. GPLv2 merely says that you must "accompany [binaries] with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code." Besides, why are you in such a hurry to get your hands on a modified BusyBox tarball, anyway? You can always get the latest and greatest BusyBox sources directly from the project website. I'm guessing you don't even have a Hava video streaming device, and thus can't even use the source code that they will be publishing. Since Monsoon isn't going to release their proprietary video streaming software under the GPL, I fail to see how access to the modified BusyBox sources will be useful to anyone.
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it's called infringement Posted Sep 26, 2007 3:00 UTC (Wed) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]
By that reasoning, there has never been a need for free software, at least, in your world. Monsoon is infringing copyright. Monsoon pledges to continue their infringement for some indeterminate time. Unless and until the copyright owners magnanimously forgive Monsoon's past and continuing infringement, Monsoon is subject to severe remedies. You might want to read those along with the complaint that was filed. While compliance is the ultimate goal of RMS, the FSF, Eben Moglen and gpl-violations.org, this is not a requirement imposed on all who choose to place their work under the GPL. Even though the BusyBox developers have the legal right to press their case against the admitted infringer, and their Hall of Shame page gives reason enough for their patience to be thin, their intent appears to be to obtain compliance:
I hope Prof. Moglen's comment is sufficient to explain how access to the source is useful. If not, please read Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism by Richard Stallman.
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