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Stalwarts Claim Asus eeePC Violates GPL
WirePosted writes "Members of the Linux community have complained that the hot new sub-notebook from Asus, the eeePC, may have violated the spirit of the Linux General Public License (GPL). Some Linux advocates claim the eeePC has not included required source code with the installed Xandros Linux distribution and does not easily enable users to install another distro. However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don't care."
Speaking as a free software developer, if I was MS I would put people on mailing lists and message boards for free software projects and then have them bitch and moan about every conceivable potential violation.
To exemplify: I released a piece of software, (all original c:a 6000 loc) under the GPL. Some people started bitching to me that I had to include build files, or that my copyright text wasn't right and so on. This caused me to have to go and look it up in the license (which is not trivial because as an original author, not all conditions apply) just to be able to respond.
By the third time this happened, I said screw it, and withdrew my software.
License nit picking can sap developer enthusiasm like a scifi death ray. If MS really wanted to slow down the progress of free software, I'd say that this is a viable attack vector.
asus_acpi isn't even the worst of it. Their modified madwifi supports a chipset that the rest of the madwifi community has been wanting support for for months. I read something somewhere about madwifi being licensed in a way which allows this (which seems silly, on the surface, as the community now has to duplicate asus' efforts), but it still doesn't make sense to me. it's not a secret what the wifi chipset in the eee is, so I don't see what they gain by not allowing other linux distros to support it...it's not like they're making millions selling Xandros licenses.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.