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Castle Denies GPL Breach
Anonymous Coward writes "Castle Technology, who were accused of breaching the GPL in RISC OS 5, have made a press release denying the allegations. This story has been covered on The Iconbar RISC OS news and resource site." We've given Castle some loving here on slashdot recently. Looks like this one isn't going away quietly.
At one point they say:
"The RISC OS 5.00 kernel did not contain work taken from or derived from the ARM-Linux or Linux kernel
then they say:
has it's PCI allocation and bridge setup based in part on the following functions from the Linux kernel sources:
So they say "based in part on the following functions", so are they saying that they have literally taken no CODE but were BASING their code on some Linux kernel code? So are they then saying that perhaps they just took the api from the LK but the code itself is new? If this is the case, then I could see how there would be a lot of confusion and that they have done nothing wrong. If not, then I'm not sure what they're trying to say?
GPL defines the source code as "the preferred form for making modifications to the work". So unless their engineers are way way way way better at doing hex arithmetic and mental cryptography than most of us are, yes the GPL does have a provision against it.
Don't know what kind of difference that would make.
Not a ton. Assuming the GPL is tossed out, that means Castle gets only the standard set of rights that copyright grants, which still denies them the ability to use this code (since they didn't ask permission of the copyright holder).
So the only way Castle can really win is to prove they didn't use the code in question.