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Telstra Violating the GPL?

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-playing-by-the-rules dept.

daria42 writes "It looks like Australia's largest telco, Telstra, hasn't exactly been paying attention to its responsibilities under the GNU GPL. Australian coder Angus Gratton has been investigating the company's branded T-Hub, T-Box and T-Touch products — all based on Linux, and all without any source code or GPL license attached. Naughty. However, it's not as though Telstra is the only one to blame — the goods are manufactured by Sagem, Netgem and Huawei respectively." Telstra responded quickly to Gratton's claims, saying they would work with the vendors to straighten out the licensing situation and fix any compliance issues.

5 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. I dislike Telstra as much as anyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In Australia Telstra is the villain that everyone loves to hate. But in this case, it is not really their problem. They paid some OEM for a branded product that I very much doubt they had that much invested in. This is really a minor oversight that has been turned into a story.

    1. Re:I dislike Telstra as much as anyone by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ignorance is no excuse. I've been told this by a judge while in court. Time for a Judge to tell Telstra.

  2. I hope it goes to court by abhi_beckert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Telstra should get a serious ass kicking over this. The amount of money they've spent on advertising alone for this product line wipes out any possible "we didn't know" excuse.

    They had to have been told, by multiple lawyers, that this is happening.

    If an ordinary person can get fined millions of dollars for minor IP violations, then a corporation the size of Telstra should be fined tens of billions for knowingly violating the GPL in a flagship product. But of course, the law is never fair.

  3. Re:Just because they have branded it by dattaway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In your analogy of Toyota distributing cars without following terms of the license, the dealer is NOT authorized to distribute under terms of the license. It becomes a copyright violation. The GPL is very clear about this.

  4. Stories like this don't help by kevingolding2001 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Until my contract ended, I was recently working for a large IT company (50K people worldwide).

    The company did a sales demo recently, and one of the main concerns of the client was that 'we don't use open source in any way'. The client was shit scared of anything to do with 'open source' because they believed that if any were used for anything, suddenly they had to give away all their proprietary secrets to the world.

    I tried to explain the differences between the licenses to my boss (BSD vs. GPL vs. Apache etc) and what the GPL really meant (If you don't distribute you have no problem) but since it was my leaving do and people just wanted to drink beer, I don't think anyone was listening.

    Stories like this about Telstra just pander to the FUDists.