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FSF Statement on Violation of GPL by RTLinux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the interesting-stuff dept.

bkuhn writes "The FSF has issued an official statement on the GPL violation by RTLinux." nothign surprising here, basically they say that RTLinux is violating the GPL by not releasing the source to their Linux kernel mods, but since the FSF isn't the copyright holder, they can't do much about it. Now it's up to RTLinux to decide if they are gonna do the right thing or not.Update: 09/16 00:48 AM GMT by H : Please check out these comments for more information - it's not a source code violation, but a patent issue.

2 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Here's the patent. by bopo · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Adding real-time support to general purpose operating systems

    --
    "Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
  2. Re:I hope they do the wrong thing. by thogard · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Maybe you should read the DMCA and see if there is something there to use aginst them. Its got engouh crud in it that there should be something.

    I've found another GPL violation and right now I'm waiting for the very well known company to dig themselves in a bit deeper but I ran into a problem. How do I know its GPL'ed? I can't reverse engineer their code so how would I ever know? If they have as part of their license that I can't run "strings" on the code and I do, I can go to jail for using a hacking tool on their binary image. The GPL does not give you the rights most people here think it does and it only gives your rights to change a program if you have the full source code and can compile it from scratch. The GPL needs to be extended so to explicitly allow thouse bits that the DMCA have now made illegal such as the ability to take a debugger to the resulting code.