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German Court Convicts Skype For Breaching GPL

Posted by kdawson on from the means-what-it-says dept.

terber writes "A German court has once again upheld the GPLv2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating the GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone 'SMCWSKP 100' without proper source code access. (Original is in German, link is a Google translation.) Skype later added a flyer to the phones' packaging giving a URL where the sources could be obtained; but the court found this insufficient and in breach of GPL section 3. The plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs gpl-violations.org. The decision is available in German at www.ifross.de (Google translation here)."

2 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. The interesting part by jeti · · Score: 4, Interesting

    After a previous conviction, a sheet was included
    with the phone that contained URLs to the GPL-
    license and to the source code . The articles do
    not make any statement on whether the source code
    contained all modifications, but they do not claim
    otherwise.

    The court decided that providing only an URL to the
    license was not enough and that the whole license
    should have been included in printed form.

    So far, so good. Now the interesting part is that
    according to the judge, providing a link to the
    source code is only acceptable for software that
    is provided on the internet. For software that comes
    preinstalled, the source must also be delivered with
    the device.

    This decision seems extremely strange to me. It is
    not what I read in the GPL v2. Here is the relevant
    part:

    3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
    under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
    Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the
    following:

            a) ...
            b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost
    of physically performing source distribution, a complete
    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
    customarily used for software interchange; or,
            c) ...

  2. Re:Damn by ravenshrike · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let me get this straight. It's a net based phone application, which you need access to the internet to be able to use anyway, but yet an url where you can find the source code for the relevant part of the app isn't sufficient? Can someone help explain the insanity here, or am I not seeing something blindingly obvious?