This brief article from CNet indicates that Astak is among the companies being sued:
Quote:
Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center.
According to the complaint (PDF), the defendants sold products containing software application BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
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From the BusyBox web site:
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BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.
BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add some device nodes in /dev, a few configuration files in /etc, and a Linux kernel.
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The legal brief (
PDF here) indicates that the GPL violation is that the object code (executable program) is being distributed WITHOUT also making the source code to the product available.
Astak's alleged infringement appears to relate to their security camera systems. From the legal brief:
Quote:
On information and belief, each Defendant sells electronic products, such as high definition televisions, digital video recorders, DVD players, video cameras, wireless routers, etc., that contain embedded executable forms of software, called "firmware," or offers electronic versions of firmware for download via their website.
...Astak's CM-818DVR4V security camera system with DVR and CM-04DE and CM-04DEV security system DVR devices...
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