Congratulations to Harald Welte on Another One

I'd like to congratulate Harald Welte on yet another great decision in the Berlin court, this time regarding a long-known GPL violator called Fantec. There are so many violations of this nature that are of course so trivially easy to find; it's often tough to pick which one to take action on. Harald has done a great job being selective to make good examples of violators.

Just as a bit of history, I first documented and confirmed the Fantec violation in January 2009, based on this email sent to the BusyBox mailing list. I discovered that the product didn't seem to be regularly on sale in the USA, so it wasn't ultimately part of the lawsuit that Conservancy and Erik Andersen filed in late 2009.

However, since Fantec products were on sale mostly in Germany, it was a great case for Harald to pursue. I'm not surprised in the least that even three years after I confirmed the violation, gpl-violations.org found Fantec still out of compliance and was able to take action at that point. It's not surprising either that it took an entire year thereafter to get it resolved. My reaction to that was actually: Darn, that Berlin Court acts fast compared to Courts in the USA. :)