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GPL Case Against Danish Satellite Provider

Posted by timothy on from the hey-bub-that's-a-license-you're-sittin'-on dept.

Rohde writes "The number of satellite and cable boxes on the Danish market using Linux has significantly increased during the last couple of years. The providers Viasat, Yousee and Stofa all provide HD receivers based on Linux, and all of them fail to provide the source code or make customers aware of the fact that the units are based on GPL licensed software. I decided it was time to fix this situation and luckily the Danish legal company BvHD has decided to take the case. We are starting with Viasat, which distributes a Samsung box including middleware and security from NDS, and you can follow the case here."

3 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. linux is not freeware by Scotch42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    at some stage, manufacturers will realize the hidden cost of using GNU/Linux in their embedded platforms... For commodity gadgets and tools, it will not be an issue to share the internals are the hardware will be the added value. But for unique items that should not be the case and therefore some other toolkit with no ogligation to share modifications should be preferred.

    And I'm making my living with GNU/Linux tools only ;-)

    More often, I see my customers using GNU/Linux because it's without licenses to pay for the final product. But they do not realize theyr obligation to share... And it'is very difficult to educate them.

    Does fellows /.ers have similar issue with customer?

    1. Re:linux is not freeware by jimicus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't think people are going to go back to rolling their own in the embedded market - anyone with any experience in embedded software development will tell you that Linux makes life a hell of a lot easier because all of a sudden a lot of things you would otherwise have to write from scratch are basically included. And it can be a lot of work to port a userland package developed for Linux to something like VxWorks.

      Coming at it from another angle, every couple of years there's an article about how even in the Western world, some absurdly large proportion of companies use pirated software. What makes you think that the GPL will make them suddenly compliant?

      What I think is more likely is that companies will start to take licensing seriously. For instance, my current employer is careful to architect our design so that anything we don't want to reveal to the world is a pure user-land tool without GPL dependencies. But in auditing our code, we've come across quite a few open-source projects which have borrowed from each other without first checking that their licenses are cross-compatible.

  2. Re:13 whole days to lawsuit by Splab · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Good for you, but here in Denmark things works differently. 2 weeks notice is plenty of time, often people just go straight to Fogedretten and gets injunctions against the offending parties.