Today we have successfully announced our out-of-court settlement with Allnet GmbH on their infringing use of our GPL licensed software. Please see the original press release.
I'm extremely happy that this could be solved in such cooperative manner. It's great to see companies are paying attention if they get informed the right way.
Some people are asking me: Why didn't you just ask them, why go via a lawyer and send them a legal note? The answer is quite easy: If you just send an email to any company, you will end up with technical support. The tech people most likely already know about the GPL and it's conditions. On the other hand, if you have a lawyer send a note, then you gain attention among the administrative staff. And that's the kind of people you want to reach for a real change within a companies policies.
There is quite a number of other companies that are using netfilter/iptables without compliance to the license term. Now that we have succeeded with the first, we are going to pursue this path and subsequently ask each of them to comply to the license.
Again, it's important to state that we very much like to see more Linux and netfilter/iptables based products. We do not oppose commercial use of our code at all. We just want the license conditions to be fulfilled - and that's just fair.