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GPL Violators On The Prowl
ravenII writes "GPL Violations.org are looking after the GPL. Warning letters were personally handed over to companies at their CeBIT booths by Mr. Harald Welte, free software developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.
It seems big boys like Motorola, Acer, AOpen, Micronet, Buffalo and Trendware seem to violate GPL. Please visit the site for more information on GPL enforcements and violators."
That gives me an idea...what if a bunch of GPL authors got together and formed a non-profit whose sole purpose was to become a member of the BSA? If armed federal marshalls busting down your door won't make you comply with the GPL, then nothing will!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I have seen violations at places like Iomega for there NAS drives. It was one of the issues that I brought up durring beta testing. And they said it wasn't an issue that they were using Linux with out releasing the source because their firmware developer for the embeded Linux told them it wasn't a problem and they weren't going to release the source. This little product only costed about 200.00 for network storage, and it has the potential to hit the market like the Linksys WRT54G did with custom firmware.
If anybody is interested in pursing Iomega about this let me know because I will sign a petition.
I wonder if some company may eventually say:
"We won't sue you for infringing on our patents if you don't sue us for infringing on the GPL"
Also, would that even be legal to accept an agreement like that? Nevermind that it would probably be a bad thing for OSS.
Actually, many of these companies (as a Corp) may not know about the violations. As soon as the letter gets to legal the practice will stop.
I work in a very large Semiconductor manufacturer and we have the policy that all uses of OSS _MUST_ be reviewed by legal before proceeding. It's a simple matter really. If you don't ask legal and you screw up then you are disciplined up to and including termination, depending on the infraction and whether or not you should have known better. I look to OSS often to see how something is done. If I like how it's been done I ask legal, usually they say no and I go code it myself and then find that I did it some obscure way that doesn't weork as good.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Sveasoft has a history of misrepresenting the facts and deliberately misinterpreting the GPL. He invented the "in development source need not be released even if the binaries are out there" bullcrap. The FSF did not have access to the whole story and clearly did not see that James Ewing is not willing to have "his" software redistributed. The FSF's approval appears to be solely about Sveasoft's direct duty: Whether or not they have to provide source to anyone. It is clear that, under the assumption of source and binaries being delivered together, they are not obliged to provide source to anyone but their subscribers. That is not what the debate is about. The GPL is about freedom of reuse and redistribution of modifications which are not entirely in-house. James Ewing does whatever he can to restrict that freedom. He does not provide source in time (before the pay scheme he did not release the source to certain versions at all), he only provides source that compiles to binaries which are deliberately different from the ones he distributes, he threatens users who use their GPL given distribution rights. If that is not breaking the GPL, it's an utterly useless license.