Suing Wi-Fi router makers remains a necessary part of open source license law – Ars Technica
A German case clarified that LGPL source isn’t enough—it needs to be usable.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) and its “Lesser” version (LGPL) are widely known and used. Still, every so often, a networking hardware maker has to get sued to make sure everyone knows how it works.The latest such router company to face legal repercussions is AVM, the Berlin-based maker of the most popular home networking products in Germany. Sebastian Steck, a German software developer, bought an AVM Fritz!Box 4020 (PDF) and, being a certain type, requested the source code that had been used to generate certain versions of the firmware on it.According to Steck’s complaint (translated to English and provided in PDF by the Software Freedom Conservancy, or SFC), he needed this code to recompile a networking library and add some logging to “determine which programs on the Fritz!Box establish connections to servers on the Internet and which data they send.” But Steck was also concerned about AVM’s adherence to GPL 2.0 and LGPL 2.1 licenses, under which its FRITZ!OS and various libraries were licensed. The SFC states that it provided a grant to Steck to pursue the matter.AVM provided source code, but it was incomplete, as “the scripts for compilation and installation were missing,” according to Steck’s complaint. This included makefiles and details on environment variables, like “KERNEL_LAYOUT,” necessary for compilation. Steck notified AVM, AVM did not respond, and Steck sought legal assistance, ultimately including the SFC.Months later, according to the SFC, AVM provided all the relevant source code and scripts, but the suit continued. AVM ultimately paid Steck’s attorney fee. The case proved, once again, that not only are source code requirements real, but the LGPL also demands freedom, despite its “Lesser” name, and that source code needs to be useful in making real changes to firmware—in German courts, at least.”The favorable result of this lawsuit exemplifies the power of copyleft—granting users the freedom to modify, repair, and secure the software on their own devices,” the SFC said in a press release. “Companies like AVM receive these immense benefits themselves. This lawsuit reminded AVM that downstream users must receive those very same rights under copyleft.”As noted by the SFC, the case was brought in July 2023, but as is typical with German law, no updates on the case could be provided until after its conclusion. SFC posted its complaint, documents, and the source code ultimately provided by AVM and encouraged the company to publish its own documents since those are not automatically public in Germany.Ars has contacted AVM for comment and will update if we receive a response.Are “copyleft” lawsuits against router and other networking hardware makers common? Just check the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Europe’s wiki list of GPL lawsuits and negotiations. Many or most of them involve networking gear that made ample use of free source code and then failed to pay it back in offering the same to others.At the top is perhaps the best-known case in tech circles, the Linksys WRT54G conflict from 2003. While the matter was settled before a lawsuit was filed, negotiations between Linksys owner Cisco and a coalition led by the Free Software Foundation, publisher of the GPL and LGPL, made history. It resulted in the release of all the modified and relevant GPL source code used in its hugely popular blue-and-black router.The backstory, such as it exists from reports and retrospectives, is that Cisco bought Linksys, Linksys outsourced certain chipset development to Broadcom, and Broadcom outsourced firmware development to an overseas developer. Everybody up the chain ended up with a lawsuit once people started looking.Cisco made history yet again in 2007 when it was the first entity to be actually sued by the FSF over GPL violations, which started in 2003 and continued to come up with new hardware products. Cisco settled the case with the FSF in 2009, making a donation to the FSF and appointing a Free Software Director at the company to keep track of its licensing obligations.Prior to the FSF lawsuit, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) had filed lawsuits against hardware makers on behalf of the creators of BusyBox, a collection of Linux command-line utilities bundled into one tiny executable. Some settled, more were filed, and some defendants went bankrupt. At one point, a judge ordered all of one defendant’s infringing HDTVs containing BusyBox to be surrendered to the plaintiffs. (This writer would have liked to see that, but I can’t find a resolution thereof.)In almost every case, both the SFLC and the FSF have stated that lawsuits were filed only after multiple attempts to seek compliance from license violators had failed. To this day, it does not pay to ignore the emails from the programmer with questions about source licensing.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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