Telstra Violating the GPL?

Posted by Soulskill on Monday November 8, 2010 @10:17PM 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.

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I hope it goes to court by abhi_beckert · 2010-11-08 23:04 · 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.