Court documents and source code of successful SFC-funded lawsuit in Germany against AVM
We are pleased to be able to share with you the complaint and final court decision in the SFC-funded lawsuit against router manufacturer AVM, in both their original German, and in an English version translated by a dispassionate legal document translator, hired by SFC. The German legal system does not make court dockets public by default, so we are limited in what we can publish. We encourage AVM to publish the filings written by its own lawyers, for greater transparency. We understand, for example, that (happily) AVM chose to provide "the scripts used to control ... installation of the library" prior to the final court decision. (Documents in AVM's possession, which are not by default public under the German legal system, would confirm that.) We will post any updates that AVM provides to us here.
Here are the complaint, including relevant exhibits, and final court decision of this case:
- Complaint (German) (unofficial English)
- Exhibit K1 (German) (unofficial English)
- Exhibit K4 (German) (unofficial English)
- Exhibit K5 (German) (unofficial English)
- Exhibit K10 (German) (unofficial English)
- Decision (German) (unofficial English)
We are also publishing the source code candidates that AVM provided along the path to the final resolution of this case, which we have put in SFC's Use The Source repository of source code candidates, for the public to discuss and benefit from. Note that these differ from the source code candidate(s) on AVM's website, since AVM has chosen not to publish "the scripts used to control ... installation of the library" there, and instead provided them only to Sebastian Steck, the plaintiff in this lawsuit. Steck wants these scripts published, and they are part of the complete source code, meaning that LGPLv2.1 requires them to be redistributable, so we are redistributing them now for everyone to use.
Here are the source code candidates from each stage of Steck's enforcement efforts:
- Round 1 source candidate: first source candidate AVM provided, in response to source request
- Round 2 source candidate: last source candidate AVM provided before lawsuit was filed
- Round 3 source candidate: source candidate complying with LGPLv2.1, ending the lawsuit
The lawsuit itself focused only on the rights under LGPLv2.1. Sadly, AVM has still not provided Steck or SFC with "the scripts used to control ... installation of the program" for works under GPLv2 in AVM's firmware image, such as Linux, which it still distributes today. We implore AVM to comply with all copyleft agreements they use, and will continue to pursue this enforcement action just as we continue to pursue dozens of other enforcement actions.
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