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There have been many cases. See "12 Years of Compliance: A Historical Perspective" with sound at http://faif.us/cast/2011/sep/13/0x18/ and the slides at http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/LinuxCon-Europe-2011/GPL-Complian... .

Linksys distributed GNU software in their routers, in violation of the license. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation_v._Cis... for details. It links to the FSF's complaint at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/complaint-2008-12-11.pdf if you want to see the low-level legal details.

That WP page ends "On May 20, 2009 the parties announced a settlement which includes Cisco appointing a director to ensure Linksys products comply with free software licenses, and Cisco making an undisclosed financial contribution to the FSF."



Cool, thanks for this!


If you're involved in an open source project that wants to enforce the GPL when/if the time comes, consider applying for the project to join Software Freedom Conservancy, almost certainly the only non-profit fiscal sponsor that has GPL enforcement among its member services.

Bradley Kuhn (his personal site and podcast are linked above) describes what this actually means at http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2012/feb/01/gpl-enforcement/


Very Useful!




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