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GPL Case Against Danish Satellite Provider
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."
This is why we need a "-1 WTF" option
What does the community get out of the fact that YouSee, Stofa, and Viasat use Linux?
All the Danes on Slashdot probably know about Viasat's business practices, which are about as close to fraud as you can get without losing in court, so I don't need to warn anyone against signing contracts with them.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Which comes down to just providing them the Ubuntu CD , which most would do anyway.
Unless you really made some changes to the source code , in that case , you also need to provide the source for those changes.
I don't see the problem : if you use GPL , you know this is what you have to do . It's what GPL is all about.
If you don't want to do this , you need another license type. Often , this is a possibility too ( for a modest fee ) . I'm not sure if Ubuntu has it though.
Simply put : GPL favors mainly the end users :
by ensuring that derative products are also open source , you ensure that a product will stay open source.
However , i doesn't favor developers or companies ( who are forced to share their work for free ) .
Slipping shoelaces ?
The company NDS that actually does most of the software on the box and tracked me down actually had 1 month to come up with an excuse for why the box violated GPL. I had direct contact with one of their representatives. They failed to give me any answer. I then contact the satellite provider using certified mail and wait 13 days for their answer. How long should I wait for this to be fair? The Danish providers have ignored GPL for years and I am pretty sure they know it. It would be nice of them to at least contact me and say we are working on it.
``This is going to be great for the uptake of Linux, and will really encourage people to use open-source tools instead of rolling their own proprietary black box. Keep up the good work!''
Rather than ... take the hard work of many hands, without compensating them or abiding by their terms, and using that to make your proprietary black box? Because that's what these companies have done.
The fact that the black box runs open source software means nothing when you don't get your Four Freedoms.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
some other toolkit with no ogligation to share modifications should be preferred.
Perhaps. But I don't actually see this problem a lot...
For example, if they're actually modifying the kernel, they could use whatever trick nVidia uses to get around the GPL and insert binary blobs. But most of the time, they shouldn't need to modify the kernel, or at least, any modifications they do make wouldn't be considered "secret sauce" anyway.
But in most of these cases, it's reasonable to put most of it in userland, and to link only against LGPL stuff, if that -- plenty of BSD and MIT stuff that might be useful.
And I'm making my living with GNU/Linux tools only ;-)
That makes your post particularly disturbing.
Perhaps it wasn't your intent, but you've given the impression that simply using Linux will force everything to be open source, and that's simply not the case.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
However , i doesn't favor developers or companies ( who are forced to share their work for free ) .
Only if you're deriving your work from other GPLed work. If it's entirely your own work, you're 100% free to keep the code closed-source and/or use whatever license you see fit.
I'm so sick of hearing people crying about how they can build on another's work at no cost, but then have to reciprocate. Either call the friggin whaambulance, or STFU and code it all yourself.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
...Simply put : GPL favors mainly the end users :
by ensuring that derative products are also open source , you ensure that a product will stay open source.
However , i doesn't favor developers or companies ( who are forced to share their work for free ) .
I'm not a GPL fan at all, but it is a straight-forward non-gratis license. The cost is providing your own source-code. It is up to you to decide if you want to "pay" that "price" -- but you have to pay to play, or else don't play (tertium non datur!). There is nothing different, in this respect, to any commercial license: if I wrote a software library, made it available on my website for download and licensed it for $649, you couldn't legally download it and use it to create your own product without paying me (no pay: no play).
In point of fact there is _nothing_ "hidden" about the cost of using GPL software in a product.
If you go the Microsoft Wince (I didn't name it 8-) route, you pay many dollars up-front, and some dollars per-unit.
You go GPL you pay nothing up front and pay full disclosure on the back end per unit.
The whole problem is the perception that this is "hidden" in the first place. When the tech people sell the GPL software to their managers they, in their naiveté, usually don't know to make a distinction between free(beer) and free(open).
Once the programmers, and indeed people like you, understand enough to present the cost/benefit analysis as it truly is, then this may stop happening.
Don't even think _hidden_, don't fool yourself or others. It's right there in the language of the GPL plain as day. Just like it's supposed to be. And thats the good thing that separates it from the BSD license which has no cost at all. That is the _whole_ reason to pick one over another as a licensor.
Hence "copyleft" instead of "public domain" etc.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Please read my web page as it pretty much answers why they decided to track me down. I'm beginning to think you did not read the prologue? I was in contact multiple times with the security investigators from NDS and made them aware of the problem. We had meetings and phone conversations. It is now 6 weeks since I pointed them to the GPL violations and no comments so far. Viasat distributes the box and is the official offender, but I am pretty sure they rely on the solution bought from NDS. This is why I first tried to talk with NDS.
If you are wondering why NDS sent security investigators it was most likely because I started digging into how the box is tied to your subscription card, thus making it impossible for you to use other brands of satellite receivers.
However , i doesn't favor developers or companies ( who are forced to share their work for free ) .
The GPL can accelerate software development around a product. I think it was IBM's Linux head who made the point that the GPL is what ensures that IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, etc. all cooperate on the Linux kernel rather than producing proprietary forks, or having to sign individual contracts with each other to license each piece of technology that they each contribute. The GPL simplifies the entire legal process, which in turn speeds up software development, which reduces time to market which ultimately benefits companies selling Linux solutions. Looking at the changelogs for the Linux kernel over the past 18 months it appears that the speed with which new features are added to the kernel is increasing if anything. And this stuff just appears in the kernel tree, completely bypassing the traditional legal process, with the participants having contractual obligations but not having to negotiate any contracts. It's a good system.
To say that the GPL doesn't favour developers or companies is completely wrong. It doesn't favour some developers or companies - the ones that want to take the work of others, modify it, and then sell it without reproducing the source of their modifications. If you look at the profits and market capitalisation of IBM and Red Hat - clearly they have benefited greatly from GPL software.
If they do not comply, regardless of the reason, then they do not have any license to redistribute the GPLed software at all.
If they cannot comply then they will end up having to pay punitive damages to the copyright holders of the software that they illegally distributed and cease any further distribution of the software.
You cannot simply ignore the GPL because it doesn't fit with your other contractual obligations. The copyright holders were not a party to those other contracts and so the existence of them does not free the distributors of their GPL obligations.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
what hidden cost?
it couldn't be more fucking obvious what the "cost" of using GPL software is - release the source under the same conditions (GPL) that you got it under.
these companies just want to reap the benefits of GPL software without living up their part part of the bargain.
they are parasites.
ps: you're right. linux is not "freeware". freeware is proprietary garbage that happens to cost nothing. linux is Free Software instead - high quality open source.
... and I call bullshit on his story of "NDS investigators". What we do, we do well, and what we don't, we stay out of.
As far as technical details: no kernel changes were made; the drivers are non-GPLed, using a small GPL'ed wrapper layer. The NDS software, which on these boxes runs entirely in user-space, is linked against the LGPL'ed uClibc. Busybox is used on the STB. All of the "glue" (such as busybox, boot scripts, etc) are provided by the broadcaster, STB manufacturer, and/or chipset vendor.
The bootloader is not based on any Linux code.