The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Verizon on behalf of open source software developer BusyBox.

The suit alleges that Verizon has infringed on BusyBox’s copyrights in distributing the Actiontec MI424WR wireless routers to Verizon’s FiOS broadband customers.

BusyBox is a collection of Unix utilities optimized for size, and which are most commonly used in embedded environments. The SFLC claims that the Actiontec router includes BusyBox code, which under the GPL means that Verizon is obligated to distribute source code with the router. The suit charges that the company fails to do this. Continue reading →