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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Re:Just because they have branded it by Wildclaw · 2010-11-09 03:02 · Score: 0, Troll

The GPL is designed to short-circuit copyright and subvert it against itself, so there really is no hypocrisy. In both cases, the "slashdotter" you're complaining about is railing against copyright.
Start talking about reducing copyrights to 5 years and you will immediately see that what you said doesn't hold true in practice. GPL advocates generally turn out to be firm copyright supporters when you do, begging for an exception that applies to just their code.
OK, that is just another generalization, but there is some actual truth behind it.