Thirteen companies warned of GPL non-compliance at CeBIT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
---------------------

Of interest to editors and journalists covering: 
Linux, Free Software, Open Source, Copyright Law

13 COMPANIES AT CEBIT RECEIVE WARNING LETTER REGARDING THEIR ALLEGED GPL
INCOMPLIANCE.

HANNOVER, Germany - Mar. 14, 2005

Some 13 vendors of commercial software and appliance products present at CeBIT
receive an open warning letter against their alleged misuse of GPL licensed
software.  Those warning letters will be personally handed over to the
respective companies at their CeBIT booth by Mr. Harald Welte, free software
developer and founder of the gpl-violations.org project.

The list of companies includes high-profile names of the computing
industry, such as Motorola, Acer, AOpen, and continues with Micronet,
Buffalo and Trendware.

"While the Free and Open Source community is very happy to see more and more
 vendors adopt Linux and other GPL-licensed software, it is of great
importance
 that those vendors comply with the respecitve license conditions, just like
 with any other software" states Mr. Welte. 
"The warning notice gives them a chance to fix their products, before someone
 might get them into legal troubles", he continues.


About the gpl-violations.org project

Since more than one year, the gpl-violations.org project tries to bring
vendors
who use GPL licensed software in their products into license compliance.  To
achieve this goal, it uses a number of measures, ranging from warning letters
over public documentation of GPL violations, up to legal proceedings.  In this
year, the project managed to conclude more than 25 amicable agreements, two
preliminary injunctions and one court order. For more information,
please visit http://gpl-violations.org/

Media contact:
gpl-violations.org
Harald Welte
Phone: +49-30-24033902
Email: laforge@gpl-violations.org
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge@netfilter.org>             http://www.netfilter.org/
============================================================================
  "Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early
   architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going
   on while IP was being designed."                    -- Paul Vixie