Software Freedom Conservance (SFC), which provides legal protection for free projects and defends the need to comply with the GPL license, announced the successful resolution of a trial with AVM , a company accused of breaking LGPL license conditions in router firmware. The case was brought to the German court by Sebastian Shteta ( Sebastian Stack ), who demanded the source code of the firmware under the LGPLV2.1 license.
The claim was made against AVM for their failure to provide the complete source code of libraries used in the firmware of the AVM Fritz! Box 4020 router. As a consumer who purchased the device, Sebastian requested access to the code for open libraries UCLIBC, Libblkid, Libexif, and Libosip2, used in the firmware for data transfer logging. AVM initially provided incomplete code that was not usable in the firmware compilation.
Despite pre-trial attempts to resolve the issue, AVM refused to comply with the terms of the LGPL license. In July 2023, a lawsuit was filed, resulting in a court decision in the summer of 2024 that favored the plaintiff. Recent expiration of the appeal period indicates AVM’s acceptance of the court’s ruling, as they provided the requested firmware code components and covered legal expenses.
During the court proceedings, AVM argued that the initial code provided was sufficient for RAM changes, while the plaintiff argued for the ability to make firmware-level changes stored in Flash memory. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, requiring AVM to provide the necessary information for making persistent changes after device reboots.