The lawsuit violated the first open source license in the United States

Programmers of the open-source software project BusyBox have submitted to a US court accusing Monsoon Multimedia of violating the Software Public Property Rights (GPL) principle.

This is the first lawsuit regarding the conditions of the GPL in full compliance with US law provisions.

The BusyBox project provides utility tools that allow programmers to embed Unix systems. These software packages have been licensed under GPLv2 regulations. Although this license allows programmers to redistribute applications completely for free, it is required to specify the source and publish the source code if any changes are made.

Monsoon Multimedia is a technology company specializing in the research and development of Mpeg standard image compression system for mobile devices. The products of the company have exploited and modified BusyBox software, so the prosecution has forced Monsoon Multimedia to ignore the source code.

The lawsuit makes people think of a similar impasse that happened in Europe. Two German programmers accused D-Link of violating the Public Property Software's rights for another open source project.

Vu Anh Tu