BusyBox Support Letter

From Mwiki

We recently discovered that our software, Busybox, was being distributed by Iliad, a French telecom company. We enjoy seeing our BusyBox work used by others -- that is why we licensed our software to the world as under the GPL version 2, the same license as the Linux kernel.

However, we were very saddened to learn that this company is violating our copyright license. When we made this software available to all, we chose to license the result of literally thousands of hours of our work under GPLv2 so that everyone who receives it would share the same freedom we have to run, study, redistribute, and improve it. But to exercise the rights we intended them to have, they need the source code. This is both central to the spirit of the GPL and an explicit requirement of the GPL version 2 license terms.

We understand also from our colleagues in France that this company has not been open with the community in discussing the violation matter during their attempts to resolve it. We therefore fully support Harald Welte in his legal action, and urge all users and developers to support Harald's legal action and help the ongoing campaign.

-- Rob Landley, Erik Andersen (BusyBox)