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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."
They are Android. Google makes source available and the tablet vendors do too. There is no requirement to ship the source.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
the distributor must either include their sources or make a clear offer to their customers to provide them on demand. They needn't provide them to the general public.
If they ship the source with the binary, then they do not have to provide the source to anyone else. If they don't ship the source with the binary, then they must make the source available to anyone who has a copy of the binary, not just their direct customers (or really anyone under certain circumstances). The GPLv2 was clearer in that regard: For commercial distribution, either ship with source or make available to "any third party". (The first party is who offers the license, the second party accepts it, so "any third party" is the general public). It is much preferable for distributors to ship with source. It fulfills their obligations under the GPL in an instant. Otherwise they have to keep the matching source available for at least three years, or longer if the product is maintained longer, and they have to give it to anyone who wants it. Distributors, ship the source, it's the easy way.
Quoting from the GPL v2 section 3(b):
"Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange"
You don't have to choose that option - you can use 3(a) instead, but that means that the source has to be with the device when you sell it.
yea companies like Samsung ...
ok BSchinatech.ripoff I can understand, I pay 75 bucks for a tab, 5 years later who gives a crap
but Sylvania is on that list too, are they a no-name company that will vanish from a little GPL lawsuit? what about Zenith or Viewsonic, or Creative Labs?
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?
For most, simply coming into compliance is all they are ever asked to do in court.
Some busybox (etc) providers drag their heels on even that, but most simply hang it on their website in some obscure place and call it a day. Most of these devices are obsolete before anyone notices the missing source code.
Its not hard to comply, its just that Joe Purchasing Agent has no clue he is supposed to do so when he buys a cheesy tablet from an OEM and changes nothing but the label on the back.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ask Eben Moglen, chief legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, how the GPL has been enforced all these years.
Enforcing the GPL, for the Free Software Foundation anyway, has never been about punishing the violators, as it tends to be with other copyright-related litigation, but more about getting people to comply with the license. In another speech, Moglen explains why there has never been a court test of the GPL, which is what you seem to be looking for:
Given this kind of legal bind, most defendants when pressed by competent GPL plaintiffs would rather comply with the license like they are supposed to than fight it out in court under those terms.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
However, Android uses the Linux kernel, which is under GPL v2.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There have been tests of the GPL in court. Two I'm aware of are MySQL ab v Progress Software Corp and Busybox v Westinghouse Digital Electronics. In both cases, it was held that the GPL does work as advertised.
Even though I have not contributed one line of code, I'm still affected by it as a software developer. I earn my living by writing software for my company. I do not use GPL because I know it's illegal not to publish the code, and my company cannot afford to publish our code, due to competition.
This means that my company invests time and money (which directly affects my livelihood due to competition) into software development, while other, larger companies just take GPL'ed code and use it without fear (and without any intention to release their code). So they have an unfair advantage over my company. It's unfair, because what they do is illegal. Not "mildly" illegal, like taking candy from a baby (= taking code from whining hippy spare-time developers), but very illegal, like stealing code from a competitor. Basically this business practice harms competition, and indirectly it also harms the consumer - big companies destroy their competiton by illegal means, and the consumer is left with less choice.
GPL has a purpose - to make the code, changes and derivatives available to everybody. Using it in other ways gives big companies unfair advantage, which is in many places an illegal practice (like bribing politicians or abusing public resources with impunity). Yes, it's the way of the world, but many people are angry about corrupt politicians even if they are not directly affected.
Speaking as one of the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel hackers who helped push for VS to release source and has since identified and helped fix several of the critical kernel bugs, it was a non-trivial business problem to get the code.
Malata, the hardware OEM, is Chinese and thus not subject to US or European IP law regarding things like the GPL. Viewsonic did not develop the software in house, they contracted the whole Android packaging and UI job out to a startup called Tap N Tap based in Cambridge, MA. Tap N Tap was then constrained by the confidentiality agreements they had with Viewsonic. Viewsonic didn't really have any software team on board who understood the legal issues involved and their marketing guys had to help push everything through legal with the help of the Tap N Tap guys. Furthermore, the G Tablet is apparently distributed by a company called US Worldwide under a distribution agreement of some sort with Viewsonic - so not clear that Viewsonic ever even took delivery of a single tablet themselves.
We used Twitter to nag Viewsonic about not having released the kernel source and keep the issue in the public eye. Once they got clearance, they got the source from Tap N Tap, and posted it on the website.
This all just happened on December 24th. So Viewsonic is still most likely working on legal compliance issues for other tablets. I'm sure if people make formal requests for source and send some nagging reminders like we did for the G Tablet, they'll release any GPLed source too - they are making an effort at least, unlike many companies.
But it did take about a month long organized effort from the XDA Developers forums, involving call-ins to customer service, emails to top executives, and twitter posts. Much of that was simply education of people at several layers of the company about their obligations - again, their company never even touched the source code so this probably never went through their own legal people until we pushed it to them.
The result is we were able to merge up a bunch of critical kernel bug fixes from the main NVidia Tegra 2 source tree and we now have custom kernels that support a crap-ton of new features, along with custom ROMs. And we've gotten source for basically all the drivers too and we've started improving some of them.
No, we don't have the full source for the Tap N Tap UI stuff since Android's UI layer is Apache licensed and there's no obligation for Tap N Tap to release that code, but it doesn't affect us too much. We have the full AOSP source, the NVidia source tree, and there are so many custom launchers and stuff to work with out there that we've got several awesome ROMs released now.
I suspect there may be similar legal/logistical issues with the other Viewsonic tablets' source code. I don't know if enough people have even bought those tablets to care enough to request source code though - if you own one, make a request to Viewsonic. Heck, their Marketing VP has an account on the XDA Developer forums now, you can PM him there.
Also - that list is a bit misleading. Since we have the Viewsonic G Tablet kernel source, we basically have all the drivers and kernel code for all the Malata devices now, including the ZPad. In fact, Viewsonic released some of the ZPad drivers that aren't even used in the G Tablet (like the first gen ZPad resistive touchscreen driver).
Additionally, Advent has stated that they are working to release source code for the Vega which is apparently assembled by BYD but as far as we can tell, uses most of the same components and a very similar design to the Malata ZPad. I suspect we have nearly all the drivers and patches for that in our Viewsonic release too, but I'm sure their official kernel source will be out within a few weeks regardless.
So yeah, there are still some legal issues, but at least with the Tegra 2 devices and with most of the mainstream Western vendors, they are working their way to compliance currently.