Couple of quick questions:

1. How can you take free software, redistribute it improperly – which is copyright infringement, and NOT KNOW you’re doing something wrong by ripping off completely free software?

2. Who is responsible for all of this?

Monsoon Multimedia manufactures and sells through various channels a product known generically as “HAVA”, a video time and place shifting device. The hardware box itself runs the Linux operating system, the licensing of which is governed by the GNU Public License (GPL).

Monsoon Multimedia is a small company, whose employees work hard to develop new products, develop new functionality for and fix issues in existing products to help satisfy our paying customers and corporate stakeholders. Along the way, we have unwittingly neglected to honor the terms of the GPL which requires us to obtain permission from the copyright holders of any software component for which we have modified the code in order to deliver our product. Additionally, we are obligated to publish the GPL code we have used and modified so that all others can benefit from our efforts, and up to now we have failed to do so.

We wish at this point to apologize for this oversight, both to the copyright holders of the code which we have used and modified, and to the free software community in general. We take full responsibility for these actions. We fully endorse the concepts of free software. We are now working closely with the copyright holders to make sure that our obligations under the GPL are met in full measure.

We are carefully reviewing the full package as not only Busybox code was affected. It’s going to be a little while longer while we pull it all together.

Thanks,

Gary Worsham
Senior Director of Program Management
Monsoon Multimedia