In the past two weeks Verizon amazed us all with its surprising decisions to open networks to third-party applications and unlocked handsets and to join Google’s Android initiative, respectively. Thus, the United States’ second largest carrier became even more popular than before.

Unfortunately for the company, popularity does not seem to be efficient also when it comes to laws, lawsuit or licenses. On Friday, Verizon was hit by a new lawsuit involving infringement charges. The Software Freedom Law Center filed a suit against the carrier because of the latter’s having allegedly violated free software’s General Public License through FiOs, its fiber-optic Internet and television service.

The Software Freedom Law Center represents an organization that provides legal representation and related services to protect free software and open source software. Excepting Verizon, the company sued other three companies (Monsoon Media, High Gain Antennas and Xterasys) for using BusyBox, which is a set of tools and utilities frequently included with Linux when it is embedded in a hardware device. BusyBox was issued as General Public License 2.0 code by two independent developers who wrote it.

Verizon seems to use BusyBox in the Actiontec MI424WR router for its FiOS customers. "This router contains BusyBox, and under the terms of the GPL, Verizon is obligated to provide the source code of BusyBox to recipients of the device," said a statement issued by the Software Freedom Law Center when filing the suit against the carrier.

According to Dan Ravicher, the organization’s legal director, the Software Freedom Law Center was forced to file this suit against Verizon because the company “chose not to respond to our concerns.”