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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.

7 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.

    1. Re:Stories like this don't help by AmElder · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My first thought was, like yours, that it might be better to give Telstra a chance to bring itself into compliance before hitting it with the bad publicity stick. However, after reading TFAs, I think Angus Gratton (the one who noticed the violations) did this right. He tried to contact the company first and got no response, so he's leveraging the power of the community and Telstra is responding. The blog post linked to in the summary explains how he went about it all.

      Emphasizing compliance over prosecution should make Free Software less threatening to companies (says a guy who's never worked for a big organization). It's the right way to go about things.

      If you read Gratton's post, he doesn't write with any rancour. He's sketches the simple steps Telstra can take to become compliant. By they way, he anticipates most of what people are saying in this thread and gives his own pre-emptive responses.

  5. Re:Just because they have branded it by Stray7Xi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    The point is they don't need to agree to the license, the GPL never forces anyone into it (section 9). By not agreeing to the license, all normal copyright law restrictions apply to them. However in this case they aren't infringing copyright, they're merely abiding by first sale rule.

    In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL. Since clicking I disagree will refuse to install the app which is an additional restriction (section 10). You can't force someone into the GPL, only pursue them for copyright infringement if they disagree.

    Pursuing Telstra is stupid, they should be attacking the OEM manufacturers.

    9. You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.

    10. ...
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