Slashdot Mirror
Most Android Tablets Fail At GPL Compliance
polar_bear` writes "Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has been checking to see who's naughty and nice. Most Android tablet vendors? Naughty, naughty, naughty, when it comes to GPL compliance. In the current crop of Android tablets, most of the vendors flout the GPL and fail to ship source."
Assuming that you personally don't care about the ability to see and modify the source to the whole operating system on your phone, perhaps it would be nice to avoid this scenario:
1) You buy GPL-violating tablet from no-name company.
2) Company gets sued or threatened.
3) Company disappears and your device no longer has any support.
The area that surprises me is the 'devices produced by small unknown Chinese companies; but rebadged and sold by large American/Japanese/etc. ones' niche.
Given the number of obscure OEMs toiling away on designs based on what appear to be the same set of chipsets, you would expect that a large reseller would have its choice of OEMs, and strong ability to dictate terms. Further, you would expect that the respective legal departments of these re-badgers would absolutely flip out at the idea of incurring substantial risk of copyright infringement risk.
The odds that Sylvania actually produced the hardware being marketed under their name are not huge; but Sylvania is a US-market brand of a pretty big Japanese electronics outfit. If anybody were to sue them about it, there could be serious money on the table.
Coby Electronics Corporation, while it isn't exactly a luxury brand(seen by name in places like CVS pharmacy's electronics aisle, does some OEM work for Radio Shack), is a company with nontrivial size and US presence. Were I their lawyer, I'd be turning a cool shade of purple at the amount of liability we were racking up to score some tiny margins on skeezy wannabe android tablets to be sold to suckers at CVS.
While FOSS guys tend to be nice about it, the penalties in the US for copyright infringement are downright draconian, and that niceness is wholly optional.
I suspect, percentage wise, it is fairly safe; but more than a few well-known names have been bitten for noncompliance with respect to busybox utilities... It's hardly a certainty, I'm just surprised that, given the likely bargaining power of the re-badger vs. the random throwaway OEM, that legal is signing off on even modest risk.
Hardly bitten, more like they got a mildly dirty look from a random stranger. Have there been any settlements or awards that were more than a slap on the wrist of the company? Any that in any way impacted their bottom line in even the smallest way?