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March 17, 2008
Hello Verizon, may I introduce you to GPL?
I'm a techie that spends most of my days in the the software world. I sometimes deal with litigation concerns. So this little news update caught my eye, "Verizon settles open source software lawsuit." It seems that a hardware device manufacturer, Actiontec, supplies a FiOS router to Verizon and the device had shipped with some code that it didn't properly license. The code in question was some software, called BusyBox, which is released under an open source license (in this case, GPLv2.)
I actually have an Actiontec FiOS router in my house.
Except for the flaky wireless access point, it does a great job serving up my FiOS internet with phenomenal uptime. I do find myself disappointed that the Actiontec folks didn't concern themselves with the rules of open source.
I haven't dug deep enough to know if Actiontec was sued as well, but they will have to play by the rules and post their own code online. Now, perhaps, I can add some neat features to my Actiontec router at home!
It is interesting how Verizon got caught in the mix here. Not that I know what happened, but you might assume that they picked a hardware supplier and didn't fully check out the suppliers development processes. It almost makes me feel sorry for Verizon.
I'll admit that the fact that I like my FiOS internet makes me more than a bit subjective in this case. :)
If you didn't know, the BusyBox developers are a smart bunch. Their little utility helps you turn some ordinary hardware devices into an interactive computer. (I've recently run BusyBox on a DNS-323 network storage device to improve its ftp support.) It supports a wide range of useful unix commands on a command prompt (for you Windows folks out there, imagine being able to open a Windows command prompt or "dos box" on you wireless router and do a dir command.)
Posted by Bob in Computing
and Industry
and Internet